PART II THE STRUGGLE

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CHAPTER X

The Lady Venetia de Phillips, as the young woman used to call herself in the doll age, had never set foot in a common street car, or, indeed, in anything more public than a day coach on the suburban train; and in that only because the railroad had not found it profitable to provide as yet in that service a special coach for her class. For Mrs. Phillips, who had known what it was to ride in an Ottumwa buggy, comfortably cushioned by the stout arm of an Ottumwa swain, understood intuitively the cardinal principle of class evolution, which is separation. Therefore she had carefully educated her children according to that principle.

So it happened shortly before Mrs. Phillips had taken possession of her new home that Miss Phillips, wishing to pay a visit to her new friend who lived on the North Side of the city, was driving in her mother's victoria, in dignity, according to her estate. Beside her sat her favorite terrier, Pete, scanning the landscape of the dirty streets through which they were obliged to pass from the South to the North Side. Suddenly, as the carriage turned a corner, Pete spied a long, lank wharf rat, of a kind that did not inhabit his own more cleanly neighborhood. The terrier took one impulsive leap between the wheels of the victoria, and was off up Illinois Street after the rat. It was a good race; the Lady Venetia's sporting blood rose, and she ordered the coachman to follow. Suddenly there dashed from an alley a light baker's wagon, driven by a reckless youth. Pete, unmindful of the clattering wagon, intent upon his loping prey, was struck full in the middle of his body: two wheels passed diagonally across him, squeezing him to the pavement like an india-rubber ball. For a moment he lay there stretched in the street, and then he dragged himself to the sidewalk, filling the air with hideous howls. The passers-by stopped, but the reckless youth in the baker's wagon, having leaned out to see what damage had been done, grinned, shook his reins, and was off.

Before the coachman had brought the victoria to a full stop Venetia was out and across the street. Pete had crawled into an alley, where he lay in a little heap, moaning. When his mistress tried to gather him into her skirt he whimpered and showed his teeth. Something was radically wrong! The small boys who had gathered advised throwing Pete into the river, and offered to do the deed. But Venetia, the tears falling from her eyes, turned back into the street to take counsel with the coachman. A young man who was hurrying by, swinging a little satchel and whistling to himself, stopped.

"What's up?" he asked, ceasing to whistle at sight of the girl's tears.

Venetia pointed to the dog, and the stranger, pushing the small boys aside, leaned over Pete.

"Gee! he's pretty well mashed, ain't he? Here, Miss, I'll give him a smell of this and send him to by-by."

He opened his little satchel and hunted for a bottle. Venetia timidly touched his arm.

"Please don't kill him!"

"That's just what I'm going to do, sure thing!" He paused, with the little vial in his hand, and looked coolly at the girl. "You don't want the pup to suffer like that?"

"But can't he be saved?"

The stranger looked again at Pete, then back at Venetia. Finally he tied a handkerchief over the dog's mouth, and began to examine him carefully.

"Let's see what there's left of you after the mix-up, Mr. Doggie. We'll give you the benefit of our best attention and skill,—more'n most folks ever get in this world,—because you are the pet of a nice young lady. If you were just an alley-cat, you wouldn't even get the chloroform. Well, Miss, he'd have about one chance in a hundred, after he had that hind leg cut off."

"Are you a doctor? Do you think that you could cure him? Mamma will be very glad to pay you for your services."

"Is that so?" the stranger remarked. "How do you know that my services don't come too high for your mother's purse? Well, come on, pup! We'll see what can be done for you."

Drawing the improvised muzzle tighter, he gathered Pete up in a little bundle. Then he strode down the street to the west. The coachman drew up beside the curb and touched his hat.

"Won't you get in?" Venetia asked.

"It's only a step or so to my place," he answered gruffly. "You can follow me in the carriage."

But she kept one hand on Pete, and walked beside the stranger until he stopped at an old, one-story, wooden cottage. Above the door was painted in large black letters, "S. COBURN, M.D., PHYSICIAN AND SURGEON."

"May I come in?" the girl asked timidly.

"Sure! Why would I keep you sitting on the door-step?"

Inside there was a little front hall apparently used as a waiting-room for patients. Back of this was a large bare room, occupying the remaining floor space of the cottage, into which the doctor led the way. A wooden bench extended the entire length of this room underneath a row of rough windows, which had been cut in the wall to light the bench. Over in one corner was a cot, with the bedclothes negligently dragging on the floor. Near by was an iron sink. On a table in the centre of the room, carefully guarded by a glass case, was a complex piece of mechanism which looked to the girl like one of the tiresome machines her teacher of physics was wont to exhibit.

"My laboratory," the doctor explained somewhat grandly.

Venetia stepped gingerly across the cluttered floor, glancing about with curiosity. The doctor placed the dog on the table and turned on several electric lights.

"You'll have to help at this performance," he remarked, taking off his coat.

Together they gave Pete an opiate and removed the muzzle. The doctor then turned him over and poked him here and there.

"Well," he pronounced, "Pete has a full bill. Compound fracture, broken rib, and mashed toes. And I don't know what all on the inside. He has a slim chance of limping around on three legs. Shall I give him some more dope? What do you say?"

"Pete was a gamy dog," Venetia replied thoughtfully. "I think he would like to have all his chances."

"Good!" The doctor tossed aside the sponge that he had held ready to give Pete his farewell whiff. He told the girl how to hold the dog, and how to touch the sponge to his nose from time to time. They were absorbed in the operation when the coachman pushed his way into the room.

"What shall I do, Miss, about the horses? Mis' Phillips gave particler instructions I wasn't to stay out after five-thurty. It's most that now."

"Tell him to go home," the doctor ordered. "We'll be an hour more."

"But how shall I get home then?" the girl asked, perplexed.

"On your feet, I guess, same as most folks," the doctor answered, testing a knife on his finger. "And the cars ain't stopped running on the South Side, have they?"

"I don't know. I never use them," Venetia replied helplessly.

The doctor put the knife down beside Pete and looked at the girl from her head to her feet, a teasing smile creeping over his swarthy face.

"Well, it's just about time for you to find out what they're good for. I'll take you home myself just to see how you like them. You won't get hurt, not a bit. You may go, Thomas!" He waved his hand ironically to the coachman. "And when you go out, be good enough to slip the latch. We have a little business to attend to in here, and don't want to be interrupted."

When the coachman had left, Venetia turned to the doctor with a red face, and copying her mother's most impressive tones, asked:—

"What would you like me to do now, Dr. Coburn?"

"Nothing special. Turn your back if you don't like to see me take a chop out of doggie."

He laughed at her dignity; therefore she kept her face turned resolutely on poor Pete. She could not help being interested in the man as she watched his swift movements. The doctor was stocky and short, black-haired, with a short black mustache that did not disguise the perpetual sardonic smile of his lips. She noticed that his trousers were very baggy and streaked at the bottoms with mud. They were the trousers of a man who, according to her experience, was not a gentleman. The frayed cravat, which showed its cotton filling, belonged to the same category as the trousers. But there was something in the fierce black eyes, the heavy jaw, the nervous grip of the lips when the man was thinking, that awed the girl. The more Venetia looked at him, the more she was afraid of him; not afraid that he would do any harm to her, but vaguely afraid of his strength, his force. His bare arms were thick and hairy, although the fingers were supple, and he touched things lightly. Altogether he was a strange person in her little world, and somewhat terrifying.

The doctor talked all the time, while he worked swiftly over the dog, describing to the girl just what he was doing. Venetia watched him without flinching, though the tears would roll down her face. She put one hand under Pete's limp head to hold it, as she would have liked to have her head held under the same circumstances. At last the doctor straightened himself and exclaimed:—

"Correct! He's done up in first-class style." He went to the sink and washed his arms and hands. "Yes, Peter is as well patched as if the great Dr. Cutem had done it himself and charged you ten thousand dollars for the job. I donno' but it's better done. And he would have charged you all right!" He gave a loud, ironical laugh and swashed the water over his bare arms. Then he came back to the operating table, wiping his hands and arms on a roller towel that was none too clean.

"You can quit that sponge now, Miss, and I guess doggie won't appreciate the little attention of holding his head yet awhile. He hasn't got to the flower-and-fruit stage yet, have you, eh, purp?"

Venetia stood like a little girl, awkwardly waiting for orders.

"What's your name?" the doctor demanded abruptly.

"Venetia—Venetia Phillips."

"Well, Miss Venetia, you seem fond of animals. Would you like to see my collection?"

Without waiting for an answer he strode to the farther end of the room and opened a trap-door.

"Come over here!"

The girl peeped through the trap-door into the cellar. There, in a number of pens, were huddled a small menagerie of animals,—dogs, cats, guinea-pigs, rabbits.

"What do you do with all of them?" the girl asked, her heart sinking with foreboding.

"Cut 'em up!"

"Cut them up?"

"Sure! And dose 'em. This is an experimental laboratory." The doctor waved his hand rather grandly over the dirty room. "There are not many like it in the city of Chicago, I can tell you. I am conducting investigations, and I use these little fellers."

"It's horrid!" the girl exclaimed, looking apprehensively at Pete.

"Not a bit of it!" The doctor reached down his hand and pulled up a rabbit, a little mangy object, which tottered a few steps and then fell down as if dizzy. "Jack's had fifteen drops of the solution of hydrochlorate of manganese this morning. He looks kind of dopy, don't he? He'll be as smart as a trivet to-morrow. But I guess he's about reached his limit of hydrochlorate, eh, Jack?"

In spite of herself the girl's curiosity was aroused, and when the doctor had returned Jack to his pen, she asked, "What's that queer machine over there?"

"That's to pump things into your body, to squirt medicines into you, instead of dropping them into your tummy loose, as doctors usually do. See? When I stick this long needle into you and work this handle, a little stream of the thing I want to give you is pumped into your body at the right spot. Have you got anything the matter with your liver? I am working on livers just now. Would you like to have me try it on you? No! I thought not. That's why Jack has to take his dose every morning."

He went into his explanation more thoroughly, and they talked of many things that were as wonderful to Venetia, brought up in the modern city of Chicago, as if she had come out of Thibet.

"I suppose I shall have to leave Pete here," she said at last. "May I come to see him sometimes?"

"Sure! As often as you like. I'm generally in afternoons. I'll telephone if the patient's pulse gets feeble or his temperature goes up."

"You needn't make fun of me! And I think I can find my way home alone," she added, as the doctor took his hat from the table and jammed it on his head.

"I said I'd go home with you. I am not going to miss seeing you take that first ride on the cable, not much! Perhaps you won't mind walking across the bridge and up the avenue to the cable line? It's a pretty evening, and it will do you good to take the air along the river."

So the two started for the city and crossed the busy thoroughfare of the Rush Street Bridge just as the twilight was touching the murky waters of the river. The girl was uncomfortably conscious that the man by her side was a very shabbily dressed escort. She was glad that the uncertain light would hide her from any of her acquaintances that might be driving across the bridge at this hour. The doctor seemed to be in no hurry; he paused on the bridge to watch a tug push a fat grain boat up the river, until they were almost caught by the turning draw.

"That's a fine sight!" he remarked.

"Yes, the sunset is beautiful," she replied conventionally.

"No! I mean that big vessel loaded with grain. That's what you live on: it's what you are,—that and a lot of dirty cattle over in the pens of the stock yard. That's you, Miss Venetia,—black hair, pink cheeks, and all!"

"What a very materialistic way of looking at life!" Venetia replied severely.

"Lord, child!" the doctor exclaimed ironically. "Who taught you that horrid word?" Then he proceeded to give her a little lecture on the beauties of physiology, which occupied her attention all the way to the cable car, so that she forgot her snobbish anxieties.

The car was crowded, and no one of the tired men who were reading their newspapers was gallant enough to offer her a seat. So she was obliged to stand crowded in a corner, swaying from a strap overhead, while the persistent doctor told her all about the car, the motive power, the operatives, the number of passengers carried daily, the dispute over the renewal of the franchise for the road, and kindred matters of common concern.

"Now, it's likely enough some of your folks own a block of watered stock in this concern," he concluded in his clear, high voice, that made itself felt above the rattle of the car. "And you are helping to pay them their dividends. Some day, though, maybe the rest of us won't want to go on paying them five cents to ride in their old cars. Then the water will dry up, the stock will go down, and perhaps you'll have one or two dresses less every year. You'll remember then I told you the reason why!"

Venetia had heard enough about stocks and bonds to know that a good deal of the Phillips money was invested in the City Railway. But she had also learned from her earliest youth that it was very vulgar for a man to discuss money matters with a girl. Furthermore, peering about the crowded conveyance, she had caught sight of Porter Howe, one of her brother Stanwood's friends. He was looking at her and the doctor, and she began to feel uncomfortable again. It had never occurred to her that the young men of her class were in the habit of using the street cars, at least until they had reached those assured positions at the head of industry which always awaited them.

So the novelty of the ride in the public car had something of torture in it, and she was glad enough to escape through the front door at Eighteenth Street.

"Won't you come in?" she asked the doctor politely when they came to the formidable pile of red brick where she lived.

"Thanks! I guess not to-day. I don't believe your folks will want me to stay to supper, and I am getting hungry. Hope you enjoyed your ride. Some day I'll come and take you for a trolley ride somewhere else."

He shook her hand vigorously and laughed. Then he started briskly for the city, his hands thrust in his trousers pockets, his black felt hat drawn forward over his brows. But Venetia had barely mounted the first bank of steps before she heard her name called in a loud voice from the street.

"Say, Miss Venetia!"

The doctor was shouting back to her, one hand at the side of his mouth.

"Don't you worry about that pup! I think I can bring him round all right."

She nodded nervously and stepped into the vestibule with a sense of relief from her companion. She knew that Dr. Coburn was what her brother called a "mucker," and her mother spoke of as a "fellow." Yet she felt that there was something in the man to be respected, and this insight, it may be said, distinguished Miss Venetia from her mother and her brother.

CHAPTER XI

Pete was a very sick dog, but as Dr. Coburn boasted, no pampered patient in a private hospital ever had better care. Ultimately he recovered from his operation and went about gayly on three legs, but not until Venetia had made a good many visits to the squalid "laboratory" and had come to feel very much at home among the animals and scientific apparatus that the eccentric young doctor had gathered about him. Mrs. Phillips, naturally, had not consented to these visits to the "dog doctor," as she persisted in calling Pete's saviour, until Venetia had enlisted the services of Helen as chaperon. Then, being very much occupied these days with furnishing the new house, she paid little attention to Venetia's long afternoons spent in the company of the architect's wife.

These visits were, perhaps, the most educational experiences that the girl had ever had. One day she and Helen had watched the doctor take apart the queer-looking pump that occupied the post of honor in the laboratory, examined the delicate valves of the machine, and learned the theory of its use. Once they got courage to witness voluntarily its application on a rabbit. Venetia winced nervously when she saw the long gold needle sink into the tender breast of the small beast, the muscles relax, the heart stop beating altogether; but she worked one of the valves of the pump steadily as the doctor directed.

"Ain't that quick work!" he shouted enthusiastically. "It didn't take the stuff thirty seconds to strike the right spot."

Venetia nodded her head gravely, as he proceeded step by step in his demonstration. When he finished she asked with a gravity that made Helen smile:—

"Aren't you a very celebrated man?"

Even her world paid some respect to notable achievements in science, and she had heard Judge Phillips speak admiringly of certain recent discoveries by a famous physiologist. The doctor, however, roared with ironic laughter.

"Not celebrated exactly! At the medical societies they call me the crazy fakir. I don't believe there's a first-class doctor in the city who would take the time to look at this machine. They'd want to know first what some feller in Vienna thought about it. I might starve for all the help I've ever had here! Doctors don't want any one to do things on his own hook: they're jealous, just as jealous as women. But I guess I'm going to show 'em a thing or two not in the books. Let me tell you on the quiet, Miss Venetia,—I'm going over to Paris with this pump of mine and show it off in one of their hospitals. Then you'll see something!"

The girl tried to look intelligent.

"If I can convince some Frenchman or German that I am on to a big idea, why the whole pack of pill-sellers over here will fall into line so quick you can't see 'em."

"Perhaps we shall go over to Paris this summer, too. How I should like to be there when you are, and see you show the pump!"

In her experience there was nothing remarkable in going to Europe: one went to hear an opera, to order a few gowns, to fill out an idle vacation.

"Well, I may have to go steerage, but I'll get there somehow."

While they had been discussing the machine, a small, white-faced man, who looked as if he might be a waiter or some kind of skilled mechanic, had come into the laboratory and nodding to the doctor took a chair at the farther end of the room with the manner of one who was quite at ease in the place. His face, which was aged by illness or care, interested Helen greatly. She watched him while the others talked, wondering what his relation to the doctor could be, whether that of patient or friend. He sat huddled up on his chair, one worn-out boot thrust forward from a ragged trouser leg, curiously scanning the young girl, who seemed in her fresh beauty and rich clothes decidedly out of harmony with the dingy room. When Venetia spoke of going abroad as casually as she might have mentioned going to the country, a sarcastic smile crept over his face. He seemed to possess the full power of patience, as if a varied experience with a buffeting world had taught him to accept rather than to resist. His business there, whatever it might be, could wait, had always waited.

"Hussey, here, is the only feller that I ever found besides myself who has any faith in the old pump," Coburn remarked presently by way of introduction, half turning toward the silent man, and smiling as if he thoroughly enjoyed the joke of having this one convert. "He's always after me to try it on him,—he says he's got something the matter with his lungs,—but I guess it's purely a scientific interest that makes him offer to be the first victim. Gee! Wouldn't I like to take him at his word!"

He worked one of the delicate valves of the machine, squirting through the needle a thin stream of water in the direction of Hussey.

"Why don't you do it then?" the man asked in an indifferent tone. "I'm ready any time you say."

"Ain't he got nerve, now?" the doctor appealed to Venetia, his eyes twinkling sardonically. "Any doctor would tell him for nothing that it was just plain murder to stick that needle into his lungs. If I am wrong, you know, he'd be a goner, bleed to death."

"I guess I ain't built very different from that guinea-pig," the man observed placidly. "And I have seen you put it into one of them often enough."

"Why don't you try it, if he's willing?" Venetia asked the doctor breathlessly.

Helen and Coburn laughed, and even the silent Hussey smiled grimly.

"Maybe, young lady, you wouldn't mind if I tried it on you! Can't you get up a real good heart trouble now?" the doctor quizzed.

"Would it make any particular difference if I hadn't anything the matter with me?" Venetia asked quickly. "You can put it into me and see what it does, anyway."

"Good nerve!" Coburn laughed admiringly. "See, Mrs. Hart, I've got two converts now. Don't you want to make a third?"

Then bursting into his loud laugh, which seemed to be directed at himself, Coburn walked to the rear of the room, raised a trap-door, and whistled for Pete. He thrust his hand down, caught the dog by the neck, and placed him on the laboratory table for exhibition.

"Nothing worse than a good aristocratic limp, Peter," the doctor pronounced with complacency. "Just come here and look at that ear, Venetia! What do you think of that? It isn't quite the right shade, but I couldn't lay my hands on a terrier that was as dark as Pete."

"What have you done to his ear?" the girl demanded.

"He hadn't much of an ear left, when I came to look him over. So I grafted a new piece on. And I cropped it, too, so it would look like its mate. Pretty neat job?"

"That's why you wouldn't let me see his head when you were changing the bandages!"

"Sure! This ear was to be a real Christmas surprise for a good little girl."

"Poor old Pete!"

"What's the matter with Pete? Don't drop your tears that way. He's forgotten by this time he ever had another leg. Say!" he added abruptly, "what do you think the job's worth?"

"I don't know," Venetia replied a little haughtily. "Please send your bill to mamma."

"And suppose I make it half what Dr. Cutem would charge for doing the same job on you, what would mamma say? Pete's worth half, ain't he, Mrs. Hart?"

"Not to me," Helen answered lightly.

"Well, you'd have thought he was the way she went on about him that afternoon I found them out in the street. But that's the luck of a poor doctor. You do your best, and, the patient cured, the bill seems large!"

The doctor's joke evidently distressed Venetia, who had been taught that it was low to discuss bills. The silent man still smiling to himself over the girl, rose and spoke to the doctor in a low tone. Coburn nodded.

"The same thing? Yes, I'll be over pretty soon."

Then Hussey left the laboratory with a slight nod of his head in the direction of the women. When he had gone and the outer door had banged behind him, the doctor remarked thoughtfully:—

"I guess it isn't just pure interest in science that makes him ready to try the pump."

"Tell me about him," Helen asked quickly.

"He lost his little girl two months ago,—malnutrition, that is to say slow starvation, and I guess his wife's not got long to live. That's why he came in this afternoon. But I can't do anything for her now, nor anybody else. She's just beat out. They came from somewhere in Pennsylvania, a little country place. He's a bookbinder by trade,—does fancy work,—and work gave out in the country, so he tried New York. He had some kind of trouble there with the union and came on here. But he might as well have stayed where he was,—there ain't anything in this town for him, and the union is after him again. He's been up against it pretty much ever since he started. That's his story."

"Poor woman!" Helen exclaimed, with a quick sense of her own new happiness. "Do you suppose she would like to have me call on her?"

"I don't know. Perhaps she might. But he's rather sour on folks in general," the doctor answered indifferently.

"Where do they live?"

"Out west here a ways on Arizona Avenue."

"I know that district. The River settlement is over there on Arizona Avenue. But I didn't know any Americans lived there. They are mostly Poles or Germans, I thought," Helen added.

"I guess people like the Husseys live most anywhere they can find a hole to crawl into," Coburn answered brusquely. "So you are one of those settlement cranks?"

"I had classes there for a time before I was married," Helen admitted.

"Got sick of it? Found you couldn't scrub up the world in a few weeks, or even a small piece of it? I took you for a woman of too much sense to mix in that foolishness. It might do Venetia here some good, teach her a thing or two. She never rode in a street car till I showed her how."

"I only gave it up when I was going to marry, and my husband thought I was not strong enough," Helen protested stoutly. "But it's the most interesting—"

"See here! Look at this floor. Would it clean it any to pour a spoonful of water here and there? Well, that's what your social settlements with all their statistics and their investigations are doing. I tell you I know because I have been one of them, one of the 'masses.' I have been dirt poor all my life. I lived once for six months in a tenement room with five other men. 'Understanding and sympathy'? Rot! You can't really know anything about folks until you earn your bread as they do, because you have to or starve; and live and eat and marry as they do because you have to. Do you suppose those English know anything about their Hindoos? Well, these settlement folks know just about as much of what the people around them really are as the English know about those darkies they boss."

"But they're trying to understand, to help."

"What's the good of their help? What men need is a chance to help themselves at the pot. And the only way they'll ever get that is to fight for it. Fight the hoggish ones who want the whole loaf. Let 'em get out and fight, same as the people always have had to when they weren't content to starve. Then you'd see what this settlement 'sympathy and understanding' amounts to."

"Fighting never helps."

"Don't it now? What does your science or history tell you? Men have fought in one way or another for pretty nearly everything they've got!"

"Perhaps that is the trouble."

"Not much," he retorted, as if he were trying to convince himself as much as her. "The real fact is, most of the world isn't worth the bother of saving it from its fate. They are refuse junk. Just junk, so many tons of flesh and bone, with not wit enough to hold their appetites. That's why the worst robbers get on top and ride, every time. They always will because they are the best fighters. No, young woman, the ruck of people aren't worth bothering about. Life is the cheapest thing on this planet; pious folks with all their blart can't alter that fact. It's cheap, and mean, and can't fight."

"What's the good of that machine, if it's only fit to mend such bad flesh?"

"You think you've got me," he laughed back. "Now I'll tell you why. I want to show every stupid doctor in this town that I've got a trick worth two of his. All the high-toned doctors have turned me down, every one I ever got at. But I can fight. See? That's why I starve myself and live in this chicken-coop. I could make money enough gassing patients and selling them a lot of wind. Don't you think I could eat well and dress well and be as sleek and fine as the young men Venetia thinks are the right thing? I guess I could. Do you know Dr. Parks on the North Side? Two years ago he offered to take me into his office if I would quit fooling with these experiments and devote myself to private practice. Parks is earning a good twenty thousand a year. The pickings in that office would be considerable, I guess."

"But you wanted something better than money!"

"Better? I don't know about that. I want Parks and all the other big-mouths in the profession just salaming there before me for one thing."

"No,—that isn't much better than wanting money. You don't want to help. To want to help, to care about helping, that's the best thing in men and women,—caring to help others whether what they do succeeds in the end or fails. Nobody can know that."

The doctor's face lost its ironical grin; he looked at Helen very gravely.

"That feeling you talk about must be a kind of extra sense which I haven't got. It's like the color nerve or the sound nerve. I've always been color-blind. In the same way I haven't that other feeling you talk about. And I guess most folks in this world are like me. If they felt like you, why it wouldn't be the same old world we know."

"It must be a cruel world of murder and hate, if you haven't that."

"Well, I guess it's pretty much the same world that old Michael Angelo saw when he got up in the morning, or Julius CÆsar, or any of the rest of them. It's a mighty lively sort of place, too, if you know how to forage for yourself."

Venetia, who had been listening to the discussion wide-eyed, burst out explosively:—

"What are you two scrapping about, anyway? Aren't you going to see that sick woman?"

"Right you are," Dr. Coburn laughed. "I'll have to trot over there pretty soon."

"And I am going to see her, too, if you'll give me the address," Helen added. "By the way, Dr. Coburn, you know my husband, don't you?"

A peculiar look passed over the doctor's face as he replied: "Yes, in a way. I used to be chore-boy in the chemical lab when he was in college. But I wasn't his sort."

Helen recollected Jackson's exclamation when she had told him of her first visit with Venetia to the doctor's office. "That scrub!" Jackson had commented, simply and finally.

There was an awkward pause, which Venetia broke by saying, "I can take Pete, can't I?"

"I suppose he's well enough," Coburn answered reluctantly. It was plain that he would like to have some excuse to put off Pete's departure. The bit of friendship with the two women, which fate had tossed him, was too precious to part with easily. He picked the dog up brusquely, saying: "Pete, you are getting skinny. I guess it's time for you to go back to the good living you're used to. Don't you be getting into another mix-up, though, or there won't be enough dog left to patch."

Pete licked his hand in a puppyish way, as Coburn carried him to the carriage and placed him carefully on the seat between Venetia and Helen.

"Won't you come to see us?" Helen asked, as they shook hands. The queer look came back to the doctor's face.

"No," he said brusquely, "I guess not. I hope to see you again, though."

"Why do you suppose he said that?" Venetia inquired quickly when they had started.

Helen blushed, as she answered slowly, "Perhaps he doesn't like my husband."

"Don't you think he's the most interesting man you ever saw?" the girl exclaimed breathlessly. "At first he frightened me; he said such queer things—things people don't say, just think them. But I like it now. I mean to see a lot more of him somehow."

"Will you get your mother to ask him to Forest Park?" Helen asked mischievously.

"Just imagine it! Wouldn't Mrs. Phillips be nice to him? They'd have a fight the first thing, if she even looked at him. But I am sure he's the most interesting man I ever met. He's lots nicer than Stanwood's friends. They are always trying to hold your hand and wanting to kiss you. It makes up for conversation."

"Venetia!" the older woman protested.

"Well, they do! And when I told mamma once, she said that a girl could always manage men if she wanted to."

As-the carriage stopped at the apartment house where the Harts lived, the girl impulsively kissed the older woman.

"I'm so glad I know you—and the doctor, too!"

That evening when Helen sat down to dinner with her husband in their little apartment, she recounted the events of her day, among them the visit to Dr. Coburn's office. Jackson, who had brought home with him a roll of plans to work at in the evening, remarked casually: "Isn't Venetia going there a good deal? Her mother won't like that sort of intimacy."

"I don't think there is any harm in it. Dr. Coburn interests her, opens her eyes to things she never realized before. I think he must have a good deal of ability, though he is boastful and rough."

"That kind usually are conceited," the architect replied indifferently. "He had better show a little of his ability in getting some paying patients. He can't be doing much, judging by the boots and hat he had on the last time I saw him."

"No, he is very poor," Helen admitted. She disliked to have her husband judge any man by his "boots and hat." These necessary articles of clothing seemed to her rather accidental aspects of humanity in the confusing fortunes of life.

"Would you mind very much," she ventured after a time, "calling on him? I want to ask him to dine with us some Sunday. I want to have Venetia, and Pete, too."

Jackson looked at his wife in surprise.

"If you wish it, of course. I don't see much point to it. Why do you want him? He isn't our kind."

She was becoming gradually conscious that her husband liked only the society of his kind—those people who had the same tastes and habits, whose views and pleasures he shared. When she thought of it, she realized that they had rapidly severed themselves from any other kind during the first few months of their married life. She had given up going to the River settlement before her marriage, partly because Jackson disapproved of settlements. They were "socialistic" and "cranky," and business men told him that they helped to stir up that discontent among the laboring classes which was so rife in Chicago. They encouraged the unions, and with people of his class trade-unionism was considered to be the next worst thing to anarchy. So in the desire to have no shadow of difference between them, Helen had given up her classes in the settlement and rarely returned to the friends she had made in that part of the city.

There was growing in her, however, something almost of revolt against this attitude on the part of her husband. There came back to her these days with singular insistence some earnest words which once had thrilled her: "We are bound to one another inseparably in this life of ours; we make a society that is a composite. Whatever we may do to weaken the sense of that common bond disintegrates society. Whatever we can do to deepen the sense of that bond makes life stronger, better for all!" This idea fed an inner hunger of spirit which her husband had not appeased. For she had in large measure that rare instinct for democracy, the love of being like others in joy and sorrow.

Jackson believed in charitable effort, and had urged her to accept an invitation to join the committee of women who managed St. Isidore's hospital. It was almost a fashionable club, this committee, and it was a flattering thing for a young married woman to be made a member of it. The hospital was under the special patronage of the Crawfords and the Fosters and other well-known people in the city. And when after a visit to the bookbinder's sickly wife, she wished to do something for Hussey, Jackson interested himself in her effort to get together a class of young married women to learn the art of bookbinding, which happened to be a part of the current enthusiasm over craftsmanship. This class met at various houses once a week and spent a morning trying to bind paper-covered literature under Hussey's direction. Jackson, who was a bit of a dilettante by nature, was much interested in the work of the class. He would like to have Helen try her hand in metal-work or design jewellery or wall-paper or model. Once he talked to the class on the minor arts, talked with great enthusiasm and charm, exhorting these young women of the leisure class to cultivate intensively some one artistic interest in life.

But Helen, who hoped soon to have a child, found these things more or less trivial.

After a winter in the city the Harts went to live at Shoreham, taking rooms for the season in a cottage near the club. The new station which the railroad was building at Eversley Heights, and the Rainbows' cottage on the ridge just west of the club, had brought the architect considerable reputation. His acquaintance was growing rapidly among the men who rode to and fro each day on the suburban trains of the C. R. and N. It was the kind of acquaintance which he realized might be very valuable to him in his profession.

Between Chicago and Shoreham there was a long line of prosperous suburbs, which exhibited a considerable variety of American society. As the train got away from the sprawling outskirts of the city, every stop marked a pause in social progress. Each little town gathered to itself its own class, which differed subtly, but positively, from that attracted by its neighbor. Shoreham was the home of the hunting set, its society centring in the large club. At Popover Plains there was a large summer hotel, and therefore the society of Popover Plains was considered by her neighbors as more or less "mixed." Eversley Heights was still undeveloped, the home of a number of young people, who were considered very pleasant, even incipiently smart. But of all the more distant and desirable settlements Forest Park had the greatest pride in itself, being comparatively old, and having large places and old-fashioned ugly houses in which lived some people of permanent wealth. At these latter stations many fashionable traps were drawn up at the platforms to meet the incoming afternoon trains, and the coachmen, recognizing their masters, touched their hats properly with their whips. Farther down the line there were more runabouts, and they were driven by wives freshly dressed, who were expecting package-laden husbands. Still nearer the city, the men who tumbled out of the cars to the platform found no waiting carriages, and only occasionally a young woman in starched calico awaited her returning lord.

Nevertheless, all these suburban towns had one common characteristic: they were the homes of the prosperous, who had emerged from the close struggle in the city with ideals of rest and refreshment and an instinct for the society of their own kind. Except for a street of shops near the stations, to which was relegated the service element of life, the inhabitants of these suburbs got exclusively the society of their kind.

The architect went to the city by one of the earlier trains and came back very late. He had all the labor of supervising the construction of his buildings, for the work in the office did not warrant engaging a superintendent. He emerged from the city, after a day spent in running about here and there, with a kind of speechless listlessness, which the wife of a man in business soon becomes accustomed to. But the dinner in the lively dining-room of the club-house, with the chatter about sport and the gossip, the cigar afterward on the veranda overlooking the green, turfy valley golden in the afterglow of sunset, refreshed him quickly. He was always eager to accept any invitation, to go wherever they were asked, to have himself and his wife in the eyes of their little public as much as possible. His agreeable manners, his keen desire to please, his instinct for the conventional, the suitable, made him much more popular than his wife, who was considered shy, if not positively countrified. As the season progressed, Jackson was sure that they had made a wise choice of a place to settle in, and they began to look for a house for the winter.

These were the happiest months the architect had ever known. He was having the exquisite pleasure that a robust nature feels in the first successful bout with life. Then blows, even, are sweet, and the whole brutal surge of the struggle. The very step of him these days as he turned in at his club for a hurried luncheon, his air of polite haste, a quick, hearty manner of greeting the men he knew, proclaimed him as one who had taken his part in the game. The song of the great city sang in his ears all the day, with a sweeter, minor note of his love that was awaiting him.

Yet there were grave risks, anxieties, that pressed as the months passed. In spite of all the apparent prosperity which the little office enjoyed from the start, the profit for the first year was startlingly small. The commission from the Phillips house had long since been eaten; also as much of the fee from Graves as that close contractor could be induced to pay over before the building had been finished. The insatiable office was now devouring the profits from the railroad business. Such commissions as he had got in Forest Park and Shoreham were well-earned: the work was fussy, exacting, and paid very little. When Cook saw the figures, he spoke to the point: "It's just self-indulgence to build houses. We must quit it." If they were to succeed, they must do a larger business,—factories, mills, hotels,—work that could be handled on a large scale, roughly and rapidly.

The Harts were living beyond their means, not extravagantly, but with a constant deficit which from the earliest weeks of their marriage had troubled Helen. Reared in the tradition of thrift, she held it to be a crime to spend money not actually earned. But she found that her husband had another theory of domestic economy. To attract money, he said, one must spend it. He insisted on her dressing as well as the other women who used the club, although they were for the most part wives and daughters of men who had many times his income. At the close of the first ten months of their marriage Helen spoke authoritatively:—

"At this rate we shall run behind at least two thousand dollars for the year. We must go back to the city to live at once!"

They had been talking of renting the Loring place in Forest Park for the coming year. But she knew that in the city she could control the expenditure, the manner of living. The architect laughed at her scruples, however.

"I'll see Bushfield to-day and find out when they are to get at the Popover station."

She still looked grave, having in mind a precept that young married people, barring sickness, should save a fifth of their income.

"And if that isn't enough," her husband added, "why, we must pull out something else. There's lots doing."

He laughed again and kissed her before going downstairs to take the club 'bus. His light-hearted philosophy did not reassure her. If one's income was not enough for one's wants, he said—why, expand the income! This hopeful, gambling American spirit was natural to him. He was too young to realize that the point of expansion for professional men is definitely limited. A lawyer, a doctor, an architect, has but his one brain, his one pair of hands, his own eyes—and the scope of these organs is fixed by nature.

"And we give to others so little!" she protested in her heart that morning. Her mother had given to their church and to certain charities always a tenth of their small income. That might be a mechanical, old-fashioned method of estimating one's dues to mankind, but it was better than the careless way of giving when it occurred to one, or when some friend who could not be denied demanded help....

The architect, as he rode to the early morning train in the club 'bus, was talking to Stephen Lane, a rich bachelor, who had a large house and was the chief promoter of the Hunt Club. Lane grumbled rather ostentatiously because he was obliged to take the early train, having had news that a mill he was interested in had burned down overnight.

"You are going to rebuild?" the architect asked.

"Begin as soon as we can get the plans done," Lane replied laconically.

It shot into the architect's mind that here was the opportunity which would go far to wipe out the deficit he and Helen had been talking about. With this idea in view he got into the smoking car with Lane, and the two men talked all the way to town. Hart did not like Stephen Lane; few at the club cared for the rich bachelor, whose manners carried a self-consciousness of wealth. But this morning the architect looked at him from a different angle, and condoned his tone of patronage. Yet the mill would mean only a few hundred dollars, a mere pot-boiling job, that in his student days he would have scorned, something that Cook or a new draughtsman might bite his teeth on! As the train neared the tangled network of the city terminal, he ventured to say, "What architects do your work, Lane?"

He hated the sound of his voice as he said it, though he tried to make it impersonal and indifferent. Lane's voice seemed to change its tone, something of suspicion creeping in, as he replied:—

"I have always had the Stearns brothers. They do that sort of thing pretty well."

As they mounted the station stairs, Lane asked casually: "Do you ever do that kind of work? It isn't much in your line."

"I've never tried it, but of course I should like the chance."

Then Lane, one hand on the door of a waiting cab, remarked slowly: "Well, we'll talk it over perhaps. Where do you lunch?" and gave the architect two fingers of his gloved hand.

He was thinking that Mrs. Hart was a pleasant woman, who always listened to him with a certain deference, and that these Harts must be hard put to it, without old Jackson's pile.

Hart went his way on foot, a taste of something little agreeable in his mouth. That same morning he had to stop at the railroad offices to see the purchasing agent. The railroad did its own contracting, naturally, and it was through this man Bushfield that the specifications for the buildings had to pass. The architect had had many dealings with the purchasing agent, and had found him always friendly. This morning Bushfield was already in his office, perspiring from the August heat, his coat off, a stenographer at his elbow. When Hart came in he looked up slowly, and nodded. After he had finished with the stenographer, he asked:—

"Why do you specify Star cement at Eversley, Hart?"

"Oh, it's about the best. We always specify Star for outside work."

"How's it any better than the Climax?" the purchasing agent asked insistently.

"I don't know anything about the Climax. What's the matter with Star?"

Bushfield scratched his chin thoughtfully for a moment.

"I haven't got anything against Star. What I want to know is what you have got against Climax?"

The smooth, guttural tones of the purchasing agent gave the architect no cause for suspicion, and he was dull enough not to see what was in the air.

"It would take time to try a new cement properly," he answered.

The purchasing agent picked up his morning cigar, rolled it around in his mouth, and puffed before he replied:—

"I don't mind telling you that it means something to me to have Climax used at Eversley. It's just as good as any cement on the market. I give you my word for that. I take it you're a good friend of mine. I wish you would see if you can't use the Climax."

Then they talked of other matters. When Hart got back to the office he looked up the Climax cement in a trade catalogue. There were hundreds of brands on the market, and the Climax was one of the newest. Horace Bushfield, he reflected, was Colonel Raymond's son-in-law. If he wished to do the Popover station, he should remain on good terms with the purchasing agent of the road. Some time that day he got out the type-written specifications for the railroad work, and in the section on the cement work he inserted neatly in ink the words, "Or a cement of equal quality approved by the architect."

He had scarcely time to digest this when not many days later the purchasing agent telephoned to him:—

"Say, Hart, the Buckeye Hardware people have just had a man in here seeing me about the hardware for that building. I see you have specified the Forrest makes. Aren't the Buckeye people first-class?"

The architect, who knew what was coming this time, waited a moment before replying. Then he answered coolly, "I think they are, Bushfield."

"Well, the Buckeye people have always done our business, and they couldn't understand why they were shut out by your specifying the Forrest makes. You'll make that all right? So long."

As Hart hung up his receiver, he would have liked to write Raymond, the general manager, that he wanted nothing more to do with the railroad business. Some weeks later when he happened to glance over the Buckeye Company's memoranda of sales for the Eversley station, and saw what the railroad had paid for its hardware, he knew that Horace Bushfield was a thief. But the purchasing agent was Colonel Raymond's son-in-law, and the railroad was about to start the Popover station!

Something similar had been his experience with the contractor Graves.

"Put me up a good, showy building," the contractor had said, when they first discussed the design. "That's the kind that will take in that park neighborhood. People nowadays want a stylish home with elevator boys in uniform.... That court you've got there between the wings, and the little fountain, and the grand entrance,—all just right. But they don't want to pay nothin' for their style. Flats don't rent for anything near what they do in New York. Out here they want the earth for fifty, sixty dollars a month; and we've got to give 'em the nearest thing to it for their money."

So when it came to the structure of the building, the contractor ordered the architect to save expense in every line of the details. The woodwork was cut to the thinnest veneer; partitions, even bearing-walls, were made of the cheapest studding the market offered; the large floors were hung from thin outside walls, without the brick bearing-walls advised by the architect. When Hart murmured, Graves said frankly:—

"This ain't any investment proposition, my boy. I calculate to fill the Graveland in two months, and then I'll trade it off to some countryman who is looking for an investment. Put all the style you want into the finish. Have some of the flats Flemish, and others Colonial, and so on. Make 'em smart."

The architect tried to swallow his disgust at being hired to put together such a flimsy shell of plaster and lath. But Cook, who had been trained in Wright's office, where work of this grade was never accepted, was in open revolt.

"If it gets known around that this is the style of work we do in this office, it'll put us in a class, and it ain't a pleasant one, either.... Say, Jack, how's this office to be run—first-class or the other class?"

"You know, man," the architect replied, wincing at the frank speech, "how I am fixed with Graves. I don't like this business any better than you do, but we'll be through with it before long; and I shan't get into it again, I can tell you."

He growled in his turn to the contractor, who received his protest with contemptuous good humor.

"You'd better take a look at what other men are doing, if you think I am making the Graveland such an awful cheap building. I tell you, there ain't money in the other kind. Why, I worked for a man once who put up a first-class flat building, slow-burning construction, heavy woodwork, and all that. It's old-fashioned by this—and its rents are way down. And I saw by the paper the other day that it was sold at the sheriff's sale for not more than what my bill came to! What have you got to say to that?"

Therefore the architect dismissed the Graveland from his mind as much as he could, and saw little of it while it was under construction, for the contractor did his own superintending. One day, however, he had occasion to go to the building, and took his wife with him. They drove down the vast waste of Grand Boulevard; after passing through that wilderness of painful fancies, the lines of the Graveland made a very pleasant impression.

Hart had induced Graves to sacrifice part of his precious land to an interior court, around which he had thrown his building like a miniature chÂteau, thus shutting out the sandy lots, the ragged street, which looked like a jaw with teeth knocked out at irregular intervals. A heavy wall joined the two wings on the street side, and through the iron gates the Park could be seen, just across the street.

"Lovely!" Helen exclaimed. "I'm so glad you did it! I like it so—so much more than the Phillips house."

They studied it carefully from the carriage, and Hart pointed out all the little triumphs of design. It was, as Helen felt, much more genuine than the Phillips house. It was no bungling copy, but an honest answer to a modern problem—an answer, to be sure, in the only language that the architect knew.

Helen wanted to see the interior, although Jackson displayed no enthusiasm over that part of the structure. And in the inside came the disaster! The evidences of the contractor's false, flimsy building darkened the architect's brow.

"The scamp!" he muttered, emerging from the basement. "He's propped the whole business on a dozen or so 'two-by-fours.' And I guess he's put in the rottenest plumbing underground that I ever saw. I don't believe it ever had an inspection."

"Show me what you mean," Helen demanded.

He pointed out to her some of the devices used to skimp the building.

"Even the men at work here know it. You can see it by the way they look at me. Why, the thing is a paper box!"

In some of the apartments the rough work was scarcely completed, in others the plasterers were at work; but the story was the same everywhere.

"I can't see how he escaped the Building Department. He's violated the ordinances again and again. But I suppose he knows how to keep the inspectors quiet."

He remembered the Canostota: he had no manner of doubt, now, about those I-beams in the Canostota.

"Francis!" Helen exclaimed with sudden passion; "you won't stand it? You won't let him do this kind of thing?"

The architect shrugged his shoulders.

"It's his building. He bought the plans and paid for them."

She was silent, troubled in her mind by this business distinction, but convinced that wrong was being done. A thing like this, a fraud upon the public, should be prevented in some way.

"Can't you tell him that you will report him to the Building Department?" she asked finally.

Hart smiled at her impetuous unpractically.

"That would hardly do, would it, to go back on a client like that? It's none of my business, really. Only one hates to feel that his ideas are wasted on such stuff as this is made of. The city should look after it. And it's no worse than most of these flat buildings. Look at that one across the street. It's the same cheap thing. I was in there the other day.... No, it's the condition of things in this city,—the worst place for good building in the country. Every one says so. But God help the poor devils who come to live here, if a fire once gets started in this plaster-and-lath shell!"

He turned to the entrance and kicked open the door in disgust. Helen's face was pale and set, as if she could not dismiss the matter thus lightly.

"I never thought of fire!" she murmured. "Francis, if anything like that should happen! To think that you had drawn the plans!"

"Oh! it may last out its time," he replied reassuringly. "And it doesn't affect the appearance of the building at present. It's real smart, as Mrs. Rainbow would say. Don't you think so, Nell?"

She was standing with her back to the pleasant faÇade of the Graveland, and was staring into the Park across the street. Turning around at his words she cast a swift, scrutinizing glance over the building.

"It isn't right! I see fraud looking out of every window. It's just a skeleton covered with cloth."

The architect laughed at her solemnity. He was disgusted with it himself; it offended his workman's conscience. But he was too modern, too practical, to allow merely ideal considerations to upset him. And, after all, in his art, as in most arts, the effect of the work was two-thirds the game. With her it was altogether different. Through all outward aspect, or cover, of things pierced their inner being, from which one could not escape by illusion.

As they were leaving the place the contractor drove up to the building for his daily inspection. He came over to the architect, a most affable smile on his bearded face.

"Mrs. Hart, I presume," he said, raising his hat. "Looking over your husband's work? It's fine, fine, I tell you! Between ourselves, it beats Wright all out."

Helen's stiffness of manner did not encourage cordiality, and Graves, thinking her merely snobbish, bowed to them and went into the building.

"You'll never do anything for him again, will you, Francis? Promise me."

And he promised lightly enough, for he thought it highly improbable that the contractor ever would return to him, or that he should feel obliged to take his work if he offered it.

Nevertheless, the contractor did return to the office, and not long afterward. It was toward the end of the summer, when the architect and his wife were still debating the question of taking a house in the country for the winter. One afternoon Jackson came back from his luncheon to find Graves waiting for him in the outer office. The stenographer and Cook were hard at work in the room beyond, with an air of having nothing to say to the contractor. As Graves followed Hart into his private office, Cook looked up with a curl on his thin lips that expressed the fulness of his heart.

"Say," Graves called out as soon as Hart had closed the door to the outer room, "I sold that Graveland three weeks ago, almost before the plaster was dry. A man from Detroit came in to see me one morning, and we made the deal that day."

"Is that so?" Hart remarked coolly.

"It was a pretty building. I knew I shouldn't have any trouble with it. Now I have something new in mind."

The architect listened in a non-committal manner.

"Part of that trade with the Detroit feller was for a big block of land out west here a couple of miles. I am thinking of putting up some tidy little houses to sell on the instalment plan."

"What do you mean to put into them?" Jackson asked bluntly.

"Well, they'd ought to sell for not more than eight thousand dollars."

"And cost as much less as you can make them hold together for? I don't believe I can do anything for you, Mr. Graves," Jackson replied firmly.

"Is that so? Well, you are the first man I ever saw who was too busy to take on a paying piece of business."

He settled himself more comfortably in the chair opposite Hart's desk, and began to describe his scheme. There was to be a double row of houses, three stories and basement, each one different in style, in a different kind of brick or terra cotta, with a distinguishing "feature" worked in somewhere in the design. They were to be bait for the thrifty clerk, who wanted to buy a permanent home on the instalment plan rather than pay rent. There were many similar building schemes in different parts of the city, the advertisements of which one might read in the street cars.

"Why do you want me to do the job for you?" Hart asked at last. "Any boy just out of school could do what you are after."

"No, he couldn't! He hasn't the knack of giving a fresh face to each house. But it won't be hard work for you!"

This, the architect knew, was true. It would be very easy to have Cook hunt up photographs from French and English architectural journals, which with a little arrangement would serve for the different houses. With a few hours' work he could turn out that individual faÇade which Graves prized commercially. Here was the large job that could be done easily and roughly, opportunely offering itself.

"I don't like to have such work go through the office. That's all there is about it!" he exclaimed at last.

"Is that so? Too tony already. Well, we won't fight over that. Suppose you make the sketches and let another feller prepare the details?"

There were many objections to this mode of operation, but the contractor met every one. Hart himself thought of Meyer, a clever, dissipated German, to whom he had given work now and then when the office was busy. Meyer would do what he was told and say nothing about it.

It was late when Graves left the office. Cook and the stenographer had already gone. Hart went down into the street with the contractor, and they nodded to each other when they parted, in the manner of men who have reached an understanding. On the way to the train, Jackson dropped into his club for a drink. He stood staring into the street while he sipped his gin and bitters. The roar of the city as it came through the murky windows seemed to him more than commonly harsh and grating. The gray light of the summer evening filtered mournfully into the dingy room.... He was not a weak man; he had no qualms of conscience for what he had made up his mind that afternoon to do. It was disagreeable, but he had weighed it against other disagreeable alternatives which might happen if he could not get the money he needed. His child would be born in a few months, and his wife must have the necessary comforts during her illness. He had too much pride to accept Helen's plan of going to her mother's house for her confinement. By the time he had reached Shoreham he had entirely adjusted his mind to Graves, and he met his wife, who had walked over to the station, with his usual buoyant smile. And that evening he remarked:—

"I guess we had better take the Loring place. It's the only fit one for rent. We'll have to keep a horse—that's all."

They had been debating this matter of the Loring place for several weeks. It was a pleasant old house, near the lake, not far from Mrs. Phillips's in Forest Park. It was Mrs. Phillips who had first called the architect's attention to it. But, unfortunately, it was too far from either station of the railroad to be within walking distance. And it was a large establishment for two young persons to maintain, who were contemplating the advent of a baby and a nurse.

All this Helen had pointed out to her husband, and lately they had felt too poor to consider the Loring place.

"What has happened, Francis?" she asked.

"A lot more business has come in,—a block of houses. They will be very profitable," he answered vaguely, remembering Helen's antipathy to the contractor. "Did you lunch with Venetia? I saw her this morning at the station. She is growing up fast, isn't she?"

CHAPTER XIII

Two years passed and they were still living in the Loring place, which the architect had remodelled comfortably to suit his modern taste. Occasionally he talked of building, and they looked at land here and there. But it was clearly out of the question at present, for each year the family budget went leaping upward, and the income came tagging after.

"Jack," so Everett Wheeler expressed the situation in the raw phrase of the ordinary man, "Jack's got a champagne appetite. But he's a pretty good provider."

The architect was a good provider: he enjoyed heartily the luxury that his money brought him, and he wanted his wife to enjoy it with him. He worked at high pressure and needed his bread and meat well seasoned with excitement. Once, early in their married life, Mrs. Phillips had volunteered to explain to Helen the philosophy of this masculine temperament.

"Some men need more food than others. They'd mope and grow thin if they dined at home on a chop and went to bed at ten every night. They must have something to make steam. Your young man was born to be a spender."

The second winter the Phillipses had gone to Europe, where the widow was still adding to her collection for the new house,—Forest Manor as she had dubbed it. Leaving Venetia in Paris with some friends, she had descended upon Italy, the rage for buying in her soul. There she gathered up the flotsam of the dealers,—marbles, furniture, stuffs,—a gold service in Naples, a vast bed in Milan, battered pictures in Florence. Mrs. Phillips was not a discriminating amateur; she troubled her soul little over the authenticity of her spoil. To San Giorgio, Simonetti, Richetti, and their brethren in the craft she came like a rich harvest, and they put up many a prayer for her return another season.

In March of that year, Jackson Hart, struggling with building strikes in Chicago, had a cablegram from the widow. "Am buying wonderful marbles in Florence. Can you come over?" The architect laughed as he handed the message to his wife, saying lightly, "Some one ought to head her off, or she'll be sending over a shipload of fakes." Helen, mindful of the widow's utterances about Jackson, and thinking that he needed the vacation after two years of hard work, urged him generously to accept the invitation and get a few weeks in Italy. But there was no time just then for vacation: he was in the grip of business, and another child was coming to them.

From time to time Mrs. Phillips's purchases arrived at Forest Park and were stored in the great hall of her house. Then late in the spring the widow telephoned the architect.

"Yes, I am back," came her brisk, metallic tones from the receiver. "Glad to be home, of course, with all the dirt and the rest of it. How are you getting on? I hear you are doing lots of things. Maida Rainbow told me over there in Paris that you were building the Bushfields an immense house. I am so glad for you—I hope you are coining money."

"Not quite that," he laughed back.

"I want you to see all the treasures I have bought. I've ruined myself and the children! However, you'll think it's worth it, I'm sure. You must tell me what to do with them. Come over Sunday, can't you? How is Mrs. Hart? Bring her over, too, of course."

Thus she gathered him up on her return with that dexterous turn of the wrist which exasperated her righteous brother-in-law. On the Sunday Jackson went to see the "treasures," but without Helen, who made an excuse of her mother's weekly visit. He found the widow in the stable, directing the efforts of two men servants in unpacking some cases.

"Ah, it's you! How are you?"

She extended a strong, flexible hand to Hart, and with the other motioned toward a marble that was slowly emerging from the packing straw.

"Old copy of a Venus, the Syracuse one. It will be great in the hall, won't it?"

"It's ripping!" he exclaimed warmly. "But where did you get that picture?"

"You don't like it?"

"Looks to be pure fake."

"And Simonetti swore he knew the very room where it's hung for over a hundred years."

"Oh, he probably put it there himself!"

"Come into the house and see the other things. I have some splendid chairs."

For an hour they examined the articles she had bought, and the architect was sufficiently approving to satisfy Mrs. Phillips. Neither one had a pure, reticent taste. Both were of the modern barbarian type that admires hungrily and ravishes greedily from the treasure house of the Old World what it can get, what is left to get, piling the spoil helter-skelter into an up-to-date American house. MediÆval, Renaissance, Italian, French, Flemish—it was all one! Between them they would turn Forest Manor into one of those bizarre, corrupt, baroque museums that our lavish plunderers love,—electric-lighted and telephoned, with gilded marble fireplaces, massive bronze candelabra, Persian rugs, Gothic choir stalls, French bronzes—a house of barbarian spoil!

A servant brought in a tray of liquors and cigarettes; they sat in the midst of pictures and stuffs, and sipped and smoked.

"Now," Mrs. Phillips announced briskly, "I want to hear all about you!"

"It's only the old story,—more jobs and more strikes,—the chase for the nimble dollar," he answered lightly. "You have to run faster for it all the time."

"But you are making money?" she questioned directly.

"I'm spending it."

He found it not difficult to tell her the state of his case. She nodded comprehendingly, while he let her see that his situation, after two years of hard work, was not altogether as prosperous as it appeared on the surface. Payments on buildings under construction were delayed on account of the strikes; office expenses crept upward; and personal expenses mounted too. And there was that constant pressure in business—the fear of a cessation in orders.

"We may have to move back to town after all. That Loring place is pretty large to swing, and in town you can be poor in obscurity."

"Nonsense! You must not go back. People will know then that you haven't money. You are going to get bigger things to do when the strikes are over. And you are so young. My! not thirty-five."

Her sharp eyes examined the man frankly, sympathetically, approving him swiftly. His clay was like hers; he would succeed, she judged—in the end.

"Come! I have an idea. Why shouldn't you build here, on my land? Something pretty and artistic; it would help you, of course, to have your own house. I know the very spot, just the other side of the ravine—in the hickories. Do you remember it?"

In her enthusiasm she proposed to go at once to examine the site. Pinning a big hat on her head, she gathered up her long skirt, and they set forth, following a neat wood-path that led from the north terrace into the ravine, across a little brook, and up the other bank.

"Now, here!" She pointed to a patch of hazel bushes. "See the lake over there. And my house is almost hidden. You would be quite by yourselves."

He hinted that to build even on this charming spot a certain amount of capital would be needed. She frowned and settled herself on the stump of a tree.

"Why don't you try that Harris man? You know him. He made a heap of money for me once,—corn, I think. He knew just what was going to happen. He's awfully smart, and he's gone in with Rainbow, you know. I am sure he could make some money for you."

"Or lose it?"

She laughed scornfully at the idea of losing.

"Of course you have got to risk something. I wouldn't give a penny for a man who wouldn't trust his luck. You take my advice and see Harris. Tell him I sent you."

She laughed again, with the conviction of a successful gambler; it became her to laugh, for it softened the lines of her mouth.

She was now forty-one years old, and she appeared to Jackson to be younger than when he had first gone to see her after his uncle's death. She had come back from Europe thinner than she had been for several years. Her hair was perfectly black, still undulled by age, and her features had not begun to sharpen noticeably. She had another ten years of active, selfish woman's life before her, and she knew it. Meantime he had grown older rapidly, so that they were much nearer together. She treated him quite as her equal in experience, and that flattered him.

"Yes," she continued, in love with her project, "there isn't a nicer spot all along the shore. And you would be next door, so to say. You could pay for the land when you got ready, of course."

She gave him her arm to help her in descending the steep bank of the ravine, and she leaned heavily on him. Beneath the bluff the lake lapped at the sandy shore in a summer drowse, and the June sun lay warmly about the big house as they returned to it. The shrubbery had grown rankly around the terrace, doing its best in its summer verdancy to soften the naked walls. The architect looked at the house he had built with renewed pride. It was pretentious and ambitious, mixed in motive like this woman, like himself. He would have fitted into the place like a glove, if his uncle had done the right thing. Somewhat the same thought was in the widow's mind.

"It was a shame that old Powers treated you so shabbily! They haven't done anything yet about that school, have they?"

"No; I thought I should be drawing the plans before this. Rather counted on it."

They stood for a moment on the terrace, looking at the house. Yes, it was like them both! They loved equally the comforts and the luxuries and the powers of this our little life. And they were bold to snatch what they wanted from the general feast.

"You must make Harris do something for you," she mused. "You can't bury yourself in a stuffy flat." Then in a few moments she added: "How's that handsome wife of yours? I hear she's going to have another child." She continued with maternal, or, perhaps, Parisian, directness: "Two babies, and not on your feet yet! You mustn't have any more. These days children are no unmixed blessing, I can tell you.... Venetia? I left her in the East with some friends she made over there. She's too much for me already. She needs a husband who can use the curb." ...

When Jackson reported to his wife the widow's offer, Helen said very quickly, "I had rather go back to the city to live, Francis, than do that."

"Why?" he asked with some irritation.

"Because, because—"

She put her arms about his neck in her desire to make him feel what she could not say. But he was thinking of Mrs. Phillips's advice to see the broker, and merely kissed her in reply to her caress. The widow had spoken wisely; it would be foolish to retreat now, to hide himself in the city. Instead, he would venture on with the others. It was the year of the great bull market, when it seemed as if wealth hung low on every bough, and all that a bold man had to do to win a fortune was to pick his stock and make his stake.

Forest Park was very gay that summer. There were perpetual dinners and house parties and much polo at the Shoreham Club. The architect, who was very popular, went about more than ever, sometimes with his wife, and often alone, as her health did not permit much effort. Occasionally he played polo, taking the place of one of the regular team, and usually when there was a match he stopped at the club on his way from the city.

One of these polo Wednesdays, late in August, Helen strolled along the shore-path in the direction of the Phillipses' place, with an idea of calling on Venetia Phillips, if her strength held out. The path followed the curves of the bluff in full view of the lake, from which rose a pleasant coolness like a strong odor. Back from the edge of the bluff, in the quiet of well-spaced trees, stood the houses. They seemed deserted on this midsummer afternoon, for those people who had the energy to stir had gone to the polo grounds. The Phillips house, also, was apparently asleep in the windless heat, as Helen crossed the lawn that stretched from the edge of the bluff to the terrace; but when she reached the stone steps she caught a glimpse of Mrs. Phillips seated in the farther corner of the terrace, where luxuriant vines curtained a sheltered nook. Beyond was the outline of a man's form, and little rings of blue cigar smoke curled upward. The widow was leaning forward, her elbows resting comfortably on her knees, and in the animation of her talk she had put one hand on her companion's arm to emphasize her words. It lay there, while she looked into the man's face with her eager, flashing eyes.

Before Helen could take another step Mrs. Phillips turned her head, as if disturbed unconsciously by the presence of an intruder.

"Oh, is that you, Mrs. Hart?" the older woman asked after a moment of scrutiny. "Did you walk in all this heat? Come over here."

"Helen!" Jackson exclaimed, rising, a trace of annoyance in his tone, as though he had been interrupted in some important business matter.

"Don't get up, Mrs. Phillips," Helen said quickly, and the coldness of her voice surprised her. "I am looking for Venetia."

And without further words she opened the terrace door and stepped into the hall.

"You'll find her about somewhere. Ask John!" Mrs. Phillips called after her coolly.

While the servant departed in search of Venetia, Helen moved restlessly about the long drawing-room, which oppressed her with its close array of dominating furniture, thinking of the two outside upon the terrace. She had no suspicion of wrong between them, or, indeed, any jealousy of this woman, who she well knew liked men—all men. Yet an unfamiliar pain gripped her heart. Slowly, for many months, she had felt some mysterious and hostile force entering her field, and now she seemed to see it pictured, dramatized here before her in this little scene,—a man and a woman with chairs pulled close together, their faces aglow with eager thoughts. The other part of her husband, that grosser side of him which she dimly felt and put forth from her mind with dread, was on intimate terms with this woman, who fed his ambitions. And the wife, suddenly, instinctively, hated her for it.

There was nothing evil, however, between those two on the terrace. The architect had come from town by an early train to see the polo, and there Mrs. Phillips had found him, and had brought him home in her automobile. She had just learned a piece of news that concerned the architect closely, and they were discussing it in the shade and quiet of the north terrace.

"I know they're going to start soon. The judge let it out at dinner last night. He's no friend of yours, of course, because I like you. But he won't take the trouble to fight you. You must get hold of your cousin and the other trustees."

It was here that Mrs. Phillips, in her eagerness for his success, laid her hand on the young man's arm. Jackson murmured his thanks, thinking less of the widow than of the trustees of the Powers Jackson bequest.

"It'll be the biggest thing of its kind we have had in this city for years. It's only right that you should have it, too. Can't your wife win over the judge? He's always talking about her," she resumed after Helen's departure.

It was not strange that in the end the man should take the woman's hand, and hold it while he expressed his gratitude for all her good offices to him. It was a pleasant hand to hold, and the woman was an agreeable woman to have in one's confidence. Naturally, he could not know that she considered all men base,—emotionally treacherous and false-hearted, and would take her amusement wherever she could get it.

Venetia found Helen in the drawing-room, very white, her lips trembling, and beads of perspiration on her forehead.

"What's the matter?" Venetia demanded quickly. "Have you seen a ghost anywhere?"

"It's nothing," the older woman protested. "I shouldn't have walked so far. And now I must go back at once,—yes, really I must. I'm so sorry."

"Let me call Mr. Hart," Venetia said, troubled by the woman's white face. "I saw him come in with mamma a little while ago."

"No, no, I prefer not, please. It would worry him."

Then Venetia insisted on driving her home, and left her calmer, more herself, but still cold. She kissed her, with a girl's demonstrativeness, and the older woman burst into tears.

"I am so weak and so silly. I see things queerly," she explained, endeavoring to smile.

After the girl had gone, Helen tried to recover her ordinary calm. She played with the little Francis, who was beginning to venture about the walls and chairs of his nursery, testing the power in his sturdy legs. This naÏve manifestation of his masculine quality touched the mother strangely. She saw in this mark of manhood the future of the boy. What other of man's instincts would he have? Would he, too, hunger and fight for his share in the spoil of the world?

The terrible hour of her woman's agony was fast approaching, when she should put forth another being into the struggle with its mates. She did not shrink from the pain before her, although she began to wonder if it might not end her own life, having that dark foreboding common to sensitive women at this crisis. If death came now, what had she done with her life? She would leave it like a meal scarce tasted, a task merely played with—something seen but not comprehended. What had she done for the man she loved? This afternoon when she saw her husband, so remote from her, travelling another road, a bitter sense of the fruitlessness of all living had entered her heart. This husband whom she had so passionately loved!

An hour later, as the architect was taking his leave of Mrs. Phillips, a servant brought him a telephone message from his house. His wife was suddenly taken ill. He raced home through the leafy avenues in the big touring car, which fortunately stood ready before the door. He found Helen white and exhausted, her eyes searching the vacant horizon of her bedroom.

"Why, Nell! Poor girl!" he exclaimed, leaning over her, trying to kiss her. "The walk was too much for you in all this heat. Why didn't you let me know?"

Her lips were cold and scarcely closed to his caress. She pushed him gently from her, wishing to be alone in her trial. But shortly afterward, purging her heart of any suspicion or jealousy,—still haunted by that fear of death,—she drew him to her and whispered:—

"You were talking with Mrs. Phillips. I didn't want to—it's all right, Francis. I love you, dear! Oh! I love you!"

CHAPTER XIV

Rumor had it that the Powers Jackson trust was about to be fulfilled. It had become known among the friends of the trustees that during these prosperous times the fund for the educational project had grown apace, and was now estimated to be from five to six millions of dollars. It was understood that some of the trustees were in favor of handing over this munificent bequest to a large local university, with the stipulation that a part of the money should be devoted to maintaining a school on the West Side where some form of manual training or technology should be taught.

One morning, not long after Helen's confinement, Jackson read aloud from the newspaper an item to the effect that negotiations were under way with the university.

"So that's their game!" he exclaimed to Helen gloomily, seeing in this move an unexpected check to his ambition.

"How can they even think of it!" she responded warmly, unwontedly stirred at the thought that the old man's design had already become thus blurred in the minds of his nearest friends. "That wasn't in the least what uncle meant should be done. I wish I could see Everett, or Judge Phillips, and find out the truth in all this talk."

"Yes," Jackson assented. "I should like to know what they mean to do."

Then he went to the train, trying to recall the names of the influential trustees of the university, and wondering whether after all there would be any monumental building erected with his uncle's money. Fate seemed disposed to keep from his touch the smallest morsel of the coveted millions!

It was not long before Helen had the opportunity she desired of finding out from the trustees what was the truth beneath the newspaper gossip. Judge Phillips with Mr. Pemberton took the seat behind her in the car of the Chicago train one morning, and the judge leaning forward inquired about the children. Before he settled back into his newspaper, Helen ventured to mention the current report about the Powers Jackson bequest.

"I hope it isn't true," she protested warmly. "Mr. Jackson was not interested in universities, I know,—at least especially. He didn't believe very much in theoretical education; I don't think he would have wanted his money used that way."

"What is that?" Pemberton asked with interest.

The judge, who preferred to talk babies or shrubs with a pleasant young woman, answered briefly:—

"Well, we haven't settled anything yet. Mr. Hollister seems to be against the university plan, and I don't know that I favor it. But you'll have to talk to Pemberton here. It was his idea."

"Why do you think Mr. Jackson would have objected?" Pemberton inquired gravely.

"We often used to discuss college education," Helen replied quickly, turning to the younger trustee. "And he had very positive ideas about what was needed nowadays. He thought that colleges educated the leaders, the masters, and that there would always be enough left for that kind of institution. So many people are interested in colleges. But he wanted to do something with his money for the people."

"Yes, of course, it must be a free technical school," Pemberton replied literally, "and it must be out there on the West Side."

"But planned for the people, the working people," she insisted.

"Naturally. But we are all the 'people,' aren't we, Mrs. Hart? I haven't much sympathy with this talk nowadays about the 'people' as opposed to any other class."

"That's the unions," the judge nodded sagely. "We are all the 'people.' There is no class distinction in educational matters. We want to offer the best kind of education for the poor boy or the rich boy. What was Powers himself? His school must be a place to help boys such as he was, of course."

They were both completely at sea as to the donor's real intentions, Helen felt sure, and she was eager to have them see the matter as she saw it. Suddenly ideas came to her, things she wished to say, things that seemed to her very important to say. She remembered talks that she had had with the old man, and certain remarks about college education which had dropped from him like sizzling metal.

"But a technological school like the one in Boston,"—Pemberton had instanced this famous school as an example they should follow,—"that's a place to educate boys out of their class, to make them ambitious, to push them ahead of their mates into some higher class."

"Well?" asked Pemberton. "What's the matter with that idea? Doesn't all education do just that for those who are fitted for it?"

"Uncle wanted something so different! He wanted to make boys good workmen, to give them something to be contented with when they had just labor before them, daily labor, in the factories and mills."

The judge's face puckered in puzzle over this speech. He was of an older generation, and he could see life only in the light of competition. Free competition in all the avenues of life—that was his ideal. And the constant labor disputes in Chicago had thickened his prejudices against the working people as a class. He believed, in common with his associates, that their one aim was to get somebody's money without working for it.

But the other man, who was younger and less prejudiced, was more responsive. He felt that this woman had an idea, that she knew perhaps what the benefactor really wanted, and so they talked of the school until the train reached Chicago. As they rose to leave the cars, Pemberton said warmly:—

"I am glad we have had this talk, Mrs. Hart. I think I see what you mean, although I am not at all clear how to attain the objects that you describe as the donor's intention. But you have modified my ideas very materially. May I call on you some day and continue this discussion?"

"If you would!" Helen exclaimed, glowing with an enthusiasm unfelt for a long time.

"Well," the judge concluded, "I hope we can get the thing settled pretty soon and start on the building. I want to see something done before I die."

"Yes," Helen assented, "I should think you would want to see the school go up. And I hope Jackson will have the building of it."

She expressed this wish very simply, without considering how it might strike the trustees. It was merely a bit of sentiment with her that her husband, who had got his education from Powers Jackson, might, as a pure labor of love, in gratitude, build this monument to the old man. It did not then enter her mind that there would be a very large profit in the undertaking. She assumed that the architect would do the work without pay!

It was not until Pemberton's thin lips closed coldly and the judge stared at her in surprise that she realized what she had said. Then her face turned crimson with the thought of her indelicacy, as Judge Phillips replied shortly:—

"We haven't got that far yet, Mrs. Hart. It's probable that if we build we shall have a competition of designs."

The two men raised their hats and disappeared into the black flood pouring across the bridge, while she got into an omnibus. That remark of hers, she felt, might have undone all the good of the talk they had had about the old man's plan. Her cheeks burned again as she thought of hinting for business favors to her husband. It seemed a mean, personal seeking, when she had been thinking solely of something noble and pure.

This idea distressed her more and more until she was ingulfed in that mammoth caravansary where one-half of Chicago shops and, incidentally, meets its acquaintances and gossips. She hurried hither and thither about this place in the nervous perturbation of buying. Finally, she had to mount to the third floor to have a correction made in her account. There, in the centre of the building, nearly an acre of floor space was railed off for the office force,—the bookkeepers and tally clerks and cashiers. Near the main aisle thirty or forty girls were engaged in stamping little yellow slips. Each had a computation machine before her and a pile of slips. Now and then some girl would glance up listlessly from her work, let her eyes wander vacantly over the vast floor, and perhaps settle her gaze for a moment on the face of the lady who was waiting before the cashier's window. This store boasted of the excellent character of its employees. They were of a neater, more intelligent, more American class than those employed in other large retail stores. Even here, however, they had the characteristic marks of dull, wholesale labor.

Helen was hypnotized by the constant punch, click, and clatter of the computation machines, the repeated movements of the girls' arms as they stretched out for fresh slips, inserted them in the machines, laid them aside. This was the labor of the great industrial world,—constant, rhythmic as a machine is rhythmic, deadening to soul and body. Standing there beside the railing, she could hear the vast clatter of our complex life, which is carried on by just such automata as these girls. What was the best education to offer them, and their brothers and fathers and lovers? What would give their lives a little more sanity, more joy and human interest?—that was the one great question of education. Not what would make them and their fellows into department managers or proprietors.

The receipted bill came presently, with a polite bow. She stuffed the change into her purse and hurried away, conscious that the girl nearest the railing was looking languidly at the back of her gown.

On her way to the Auditorium to meet some women who were to lunch with her there, and afterward go to the afternoon concert, she stopped at her husband's office. The architect had moved lately to the top story of a large new building on Michigan Avenue, where his office had expanded. He had taken a partner, a pleasant, smooth-faced young man, Fred Stewart, who had excellent connections in the city, which were expected to bring business to the firm. Cook was still the head draughtsman, but there were three men and a stenographer under him now. His faith in Hart had been justified, and yet at times he shook his head doubtfully over some of the work which passed through the office.

Cook recognized Helen when she entered the outer office, and opened the little wicket gate for her to step inside.

"Your husband's busy just now, been shut up with a contractor most all the morning. Something big is on probably. Shall I call him?"

"No," she answered. "I'll wait awhile. Is this the new work?" She pointed in surprise to the water-color sketches and photographs on the walls. "It's so long since I have been in the office. I had no idea you had done so much."

"More'n that, too. There's some we don't hang out here," the draughtsman answered with suppressed sarcasm. "We've kept pretty busy."

He liked his boss's wife. She had a perfectly simple, kindly manner with all the world, and a face that men love. The year before she had had Cook and his younger brother in the country over Sunday, and treated them "like distinguished strangers," as Cook expressed it.

"That's the Bushfields' house—you know it, perhaps? This is Arnold Starr's residence at Marathon Point—colonial style. That's an Odd Fellows hall in Peoria. I did that myself."

Helen said something pleasant about the blunt elevation of the Odd Fellows hall.

"That's the Graveland," he continued, pointing to a dingy photograph that Helen recognized. "It was called after the contractor's name. We did that the first year."

"Yes, I think I remember it," she murmured, passing on quickly. That was the building her husband had done for the disreputable contractor, who had made it a mere lath-and-plaster shell.

She kept on around the room, glancing at the photographs and sketches. Among the newer ones there were several rows of semi-detached houses that, in spite of the architect's efforts, looked very much as if they had been carved out of the same piece of cake. Some of these were so brazen in their commonplaceness that she thought they must be the work of the Cooks. Probably Jackson had reached that point of professional success where he merely "criticised" a good many of the less important sketches, leaving the men in the office to work them out.

She sat down to wait, her interest in the office sketches easily dulled. They were much like the products of the great emporium that she had just left,—of all marketable kinds to suit all demands. The architect worked in all the "styles,"—Gothic, early English, French chÂteau, etc. There was little that was sincere, honest, done because the man could do it that way and no other. It was all clever contrivance.

Men came and went in the offices, the little doors fanning back and forth in an excitement of their own. The place hummed with business; messengers and clerks came in from the elevators; contractors exchanged words with the busy Cook; and through all sounded the incessant call of the telephone, the bang of the typewriter. A hive of industry! It would have pleased the energetic soul of the manager of Steele's emporium.

Meantime the wife was thinking, "What does it mean to him?" When they began their married life in a flat on the North Side, Jackson had brought his sketches home; and she had kept for his use a little closet-like room off the hall where he worked evenings. But from the time they had moved into the Loring house he had rarely brought home his work; he was too tired at night and felt the need for distraction when he left the office. Had he lost his interest in the art side of his profession? Was he turning it into a money-making business, like Steele's? She reproached herself as the mere spender and enjoyer, with the children, of the money, which came out of these ephemeral and careless buildings, whose pictures dotted the walls.

She was roused by the sound of her husband's voice. He was coming through the inner door, and he spoke loudly, cheerily, to his companion.

"Well, then, it's settled. Shall I have Nelson draw the papers?" A thick, cautious voice replied in words that were unintelligible, which caused the architect to laugh. Then they emerged into the outer office. The stranger's square, heavy face, his grizzled beard, and thick eyebrows were not unknown to Helen.

"So long, Hart," the contractor murmured, as he disappeared into the hall.

"Why, Helen! You here!" the architect exclaimed when he caught sight of his wife. "Why didn't you let me know? Always tell Miss Fair to call me."

He took her hand, and putting his other hand under her chin he gave her a little caress, like a busy, indulgent husband.

"Who was that man, Francis?" she asked.

"The one who came out with me? That was a contractor, a fellow named Graves."

She had it on her lips to say, "And you promised me once that you would never have any more business with him." But she was wise, and said simply, "I came away this morning without enough money, and I have those women at luncheon, you know."

"Of course. Here! I'll get it for you in a minute." He rang a bell, and pulling out a little check-book from a mass of papers, letters, memoranda, that he carried in his pocket, wrote a check quickly with a fountain pen as he stood.

"There, Miss Fair!" He handed the check to the waiting stenographer. "Get that cashed at the bank downstairs and give the money to Mrs. Hart."

When the young woman, with an impersonal glance at the husband and wife, had disappeared, the architect turned to Helen and pulled out his watch.

"I may have to go to St. Louis to-night. If you don't see me on the five two, you'll know I have gone. I'll be back to-morrow night, anyway. That's when we dine with the Crawfords, isn't it?"

His mind gave her only a superficial attention, and yet he seemed happy in spite of the pressure of his affairs. The intoxication of mere activity, the excitement of "doing," so potent in our country, had got its grip on him. In his brown eyes there burned a fire of restless thoughts, schemes, combinations, which he was testing in his brain all his waking moments. Yet he chatted courteously while they waited for the stenographer to return.

"By the way," he remarked, "I telephoned Everett this morning, and he says there's nothing in that story about their giving the university the money. He says Hollister knows uncle wouldn't have wanted it, and Hollister is dead set against it."

"Judge Phillips and Mr. Pemberton were on the train with me this morning, and they talked about it. They don't seem altogether clear what the trustees will do with the money. I hope they won't do that. It would be too bad."

"I should say so," Jackson assented warmly.

He accompanied his wife downstairs and bought her some violets from the florist in the vestibule. They parted at the street corner, for he was already late in meeting an appointment. She watched him until he was swallowed up by the swift-flowing stream on the walk, her heart a little sad. He was admirable toward her in every way. And yet—and yet—she hated the bustle of the city that had caught up her husband and set him turning in its titanic, heartless embrace. There rose before her the memory of those precious days on the sea when they had begun to love, and in some inexplicable manner it seemed to her that after these years of closest intimacy they were essentially farther apart than then.

Being a sensible woman, however, she dismissed her transient disagreement with life and presented to her guests a smiling, cordial face.

Mrs. Horace Bushfield was already waiting for her in the foyer of the hotel, where a number of suburban luncheon parties were assembling. Presently the others came: Mrs. Rainbow, who was still toiling to better heights of social prestige and regarded her acceptance of this invitation as a concession to the fine arts; Mrs. Ollie Buchanan, a young married woman, who was already a power on the St. Isidore hospital board; the younger Mrs. Crawford and a guest of hers from out of town; and Mrs. Freddie Stewart, the wife of Jackson's partner,—six in all. They were soon seated about a table, eating their oysters and spying over the large dining-room for familiar faces.

"There's Betty Stuart over there," Mrs. Rainbow remarked, proud of the ease with which she handled the nickname. "My, how ill she looks! You know she had typhoid pneumonia in New York. She looks as if she were going to walk into her grave."

"Perhaps it wasn't just typhoid," Mrs. Bushfield added; "they tell strange stories. Her husband didn't go on once while she was ill."

"Couldn't get away, poor man!"

The two laughed, while Mrs. Buchanan looked at them coldly.

"Yes, this is the best restaurant we have," Mrs. Bushfield explained apologetically to the guest from out of town. "Chicago has miserable hotels. Wretched food, too. You can't help it, my dear,"—she turned good-humoredly to Helen, and then concluded with the comfortable superiority of abuse,—"but Chicago is still a village."

Men and women were moving noiselessly to and fro over the thickly carpeted floor that seemed to give off an odor of stale food. The dull red walls were already streaked here and there by soot, and the coarse lace curtains at the windows had been washed to a dirty gray in fruitless effort to make them clean. Behind their folds on the window-ledges there had gathered a thick sediment of ashes and coal dust, and beneath this the white paint was smutched with soot. Nevertheless, the ladies accustomed to the unconquerable dirt of the city ate their luncheon undisturbed.

With the coming of the sweetbreads Mrs. Buchanan was saying confidentially to Mrs. Rainbow:—

"She's quite done for herself, you know. Mrs. Antony Crawford says that she will not have her again at her house. I should think that her mother would take her away. They say that Stanwood Phillips, too, has disgraced himself at Yale—awfully fast. But Venetia must be a perfect little fool. She might have had Stephen Lane."

"So might any girl who had money these ten years," Mrs. Freddie Stewart remarked positively.

"Beast of a temper, that man. I pity the girl he gets." ...

"I must tell you,—they were at the Ritz last summer when we were, and positively they didn't know enough French to order their food. Their chauffeur used to take them about, and he would go anywhere he had a mind to, you know. Positively helpless. So we took pity on them, you know, and showed them things for a time."

On the other side of the table Mrs. Crawford's voice was raised in protest to Helen.

"You can't shop in this place. Steele's has got as bad as the rest. I go to New York for everything." ...

"Isn't Sembrich getting too fat to sing?" ...

"Who is that new tenor? I heard him in London last spring. He was fine." ...

At last Helen ventured to say, "We should be starting, if we are to hear the Leonore overture."

"Oh! bother the overture. Let's stay here and talk until it's time for Sembrich. The rest of it is such a bore," Mrs. Rainbow protested, nursing covetously her ice.

Finally the company got under way and proceeded to the concert hall, much to Helen's relief. She had no complaint to make of her guests, who had been got together for Mrs. Stewart's pleasure. They were quite as intelligent women as she was, and all of them more important than she in the sphere where they lived. They were good wives, and two of them good mothers. Their talk, however, had seemed to her intolerably petty and egotistical, reflecting a barren life of suburban gossip and city sprees. Their husbands, working furiously here in the resounding city, maintained them in luxury for their relaxation and amusement, and provided they kept on the broad avenues of married life cared little how they spent their days. In Steele's great store, and in a thousand other stores and factories of the vast city, girls and women were mechanically pounding their machines hour after hour. The fine flower of all their dead labor in life was the luxury of these women, who ate and dressed, loved, married, and had children in idleness and ease....

The waiter came with the bill,—eighteen dollars and thirty cents, and two dollars to the waiter who stood eying the tray. Helen had been rather ashamed, too, of the simplicity of the food. She had not offered them wine, which she knew Mrs. Crawford was used to having at luncheon. Jackson would have laughed at her economy or been irritated by it. They often entertained friends in this same restaurant after the theatre, and she had seen the waiter carry off two twenty-dollar bills and return with very little change. It seemed to her plain nature simply wicked to pay so much money—the blood of human beings—merely to eat. They paid, she knew, for the tarnished ceilings, the heavy carpets, the service—all the infinite tawdry luxe of modern life.

"And why not?" Jackson demanded impatiently when she protested. "Don't I make it? If I want to spend it on champagne and crab-meat, why shouldn't I? I hustle hard enough to get it."

The argument was positive, but she felt that it was imperfect. Yet all their friends lived as they did, or even better: the bill for pleasure with them all was a large one....

By the time they had reached Mrs. Phillips's box, which they were to occupy, the concert was well advanced. The massive chords of the Tschaikowscy's symphony broke through the low chatter of the boxes.

"One of those bangy Russian things," Mrs. Rainbow whispered ruefully, as she tugged at her wrap in fat helplessness.

Helen helped her to disengage her lace and then arranged the chairs for her guests. While the women opened their opera-glasses and took a preliminary survey of the hall, she sank into the rear seat, pulled the chenille portiÈre half over her face, and closed her eyes.

That "bangy Russian thing" whipped her blood and sent strange pictures flying through her head. For the moment it loosed the cords that seemed to bind her to a stake. The heat and smell and twaddling voices of the hotel dining-room faded away. And in its place the divine music filled her soul, transforming her from a weak and doubting woman, who floated helplessly in her petty world of comforts, into some more active, striving creature,—a maker and moulder of life!

CHAPTER XV

Jackson had lately bought a couple of hunters, and Sundays, when it was good weather, Helen and he often went over to the club stables to see the horses and the hounds. It was a pleasant spot of a fine summer morning. The close-cropped turf rolled gently westward from the brow of the hill on which the club-house stood to a large horizon of fields, where a few isolated trees, branching loftily, rose against a clear sky. The stables were hidden in a little hollow some distance from the house, and beyond them was a paddock where a yelping pack of hounds was kennelled. Close at hand some captive foxes crouched in their pen, listening sharp-eyed and fearful to the noisy chorus of their enemies.

No sports of any kind were allowed on Sundays, for the community was severely orthodox in regard to the observance of Sunday, as in other merely moral matters. But when the weather was good there were usually to be found about the stables a number of young men and women, preparing for tÊte-À-tÊte rides over the country roads or practising jumps at the stone wall beside the paddock. Later in the morning they would stroll back to the club veranda for a cool drink, and gossip until the church-going members returned from service, and it was time to dress for luncheon.

Of the younger set Venetia Phillips was most often to be found down by the stone wall on a Sunday morning. She had come home from Europe this last time handsome, tall, and fearless, thirsty for excitement of all sorts, and had made much talk in the soberer circles of suburban society. She was a great lover of dogs and horses, and went about followed by a troop of lolloping dogs—an immense bull presented by an English admirer, and a wolf hound specially imported, being the leaders of the pack. She was one of the young women who still played golf now that it was no longer fashionable, and on hot days she might be seen on the links, her brown arms bare to the shoulders, and her blue black hair hanging down her back in a flood. She rode to all the hunts, not excepting the early morning meets late in the season. It was said, also, that she drank too much champagne at the hunt dinners, and occasionally allowed a degree of familiarity to her admirers that shocked public opinion in a respectable and censorious society which had found it hard to tolerate the mother.

Indeed, Mrs. Phillips could do nothing with her; she even confided her troubles to Helen. "My dear, the girl has had every chance over there abroad;—we had the very best introductions. She spoiled it all by her idiocy. Stanwood is making a fool of himself with a woman, too. Enjoy your children now, while you can spank them when they are naughty."

And Helen, although she had scant sympathy with the domestic tribulations of the rich, was puzzled by the girl. The friendship between them, which had begun so prosperously over Pete's sick-bed, had largely faded away. The winter after their visits to Dr. Coburn's laboratory Venetia had spent in a famous Eastern school, where Western girls of her class were sent to acquire that finish of manner which is still supposed to be the peculiar property of the older communities. On her return she was no longer the impulsive girl that stared wide-eyed at the eccentric doctor's opinions; there were reticencies in her which the married woman could not overcome. Since then their paths had crossed more rarely, and when they met there was a certain teasing bravado in Venetia's attitude which prevented intimacy.

Mrs. Buchanan's pungent gossip about the girl, and the widow's bitter complaint of her daughter, rose to Helen's mind one Sunday as they stood together at the stone wall by the club stables, watching Lane, who was trying a new hunter. Lane's temper was notoriously bad; the Kentucky horse was raw and nervous; he refused the jump, almost throwing his rider. Lane, too conscious of the spectators, his vanity touched, beat the horse savagely on the head.

"Low!" Venetia grumbled audibly, turning her back on the scene. "Come!" she said to Helen, seizing her arm. "Haven't you had enough of brutes for one morning? Come up to the club and have a talk. That's the man madam my mother would like to have me marry! Do you suppose he'd use the whip on his wife?"

"He has his good side, even if his temper is short," Helen objected, as they strolled across the links toward the club-house. "You might do worse, Venetia."

"Quite the picture of a young girl's fancy! Forty-eight, and he's asked every eligible girl in the city to marry him, and they have all shied. So do I, though I wasn't in the running over there in London—in spite of all the fuss the Chicago papers made about me, I wasn't—you know Mrs. Phillips runs a regular press bureau! But I am not quite down to him yet."

They had the club veranda to themselves at that mid-morning hour. Venetia flung herself into a chair and flicked the tips of her boots with her whip. The small Francis, who had followed his mother, tumbled on the grass with the terrier Pete. Now and then Pete, who was privileged on Sundays, would hobble to the veranda and look at his mistress.

"You wouldn't marry a man like that, now would you? Well? You want to say something disagreeable, don't you! You have had it on your conscience for weeks. I could see it in your eye the other afternoon when you were with Mrs. Freddie Stewart—that nice little cat. Come, spit it out, as the boys say."

"Yes, I have had something on my mind."

"You don't like me now that I have grown up?"

"I thought we should be so much better friends," Helen admitted frankly.

"I am not the nice little girl you used to know when the doctor entertained us and Pete with scientific conversation mixed with social philosophy—that's what troubles you?"

"Why—why are you so different?"

"You mean, why do I smoke? drink champagne? and let men kiss me?"

She laughed at the look of consternation on Helen's face.

"That's what you mean, isn't it? My sporting around generally, and drinking too much wine at that dinner last fall, and supplying these veranda tabbies with so much food for thought? Why can't I be the nice, sweet young woman you were before you were married? A comfort to Mrs. Phillips and an ornament to Forest Manor!"

"You needn't be all that, and yet strike a pleasanter note," the older woman laughed back.

"My dear gray mouse, I'm lots worse than that. Do you know where I was the other night when mamma was in such a temper because I hadn't come home, and telephoned all around to the neighbors?"

"At the Bascoms'?"

"Of course, all sweetly tucked up in bed. Not a bit of it! A lot of us had dinner and went to see a show—that was all on the square. But afterward Teddy Stearns and I did the Clark Street levee, at one in the morning, and quite by ourselves. We saw heaps and heaps—it was very informing—I could tell you such stories! And it went all right until Teddy, like a little fool, got into trouble at one of the places. Some one said something to me not quite refined, and Ted was just enough elated to be on his dignity. If we hadn't had an awful piece of luck, there would have been a little paragraph in the papers the next morning. Wouldn't that have made a noise?"

"You little fool!" groaned Helen.

"Oh! I don't know," Venetia continued imperturbably. "Let me tell you about it. Just as I had hold of Ted and was trying to calm him down, somebody hit him, and there was a general scrap. Ted isn't so much of a fool when he is all sober. Just then a man grabbed me, and I found myself on the street. It was— Well, no matter just now who it was. Then the man went back for Ted, and after a time he got him, rather the worse for his experience. We had to send him to a hotel, and then my rescuer saw me home to the Bascoms'. My, what a talking he put up to me on the way to the North Side!"

She waited to see what effect she had produced, but as Helen said nothing she continued with a laugh:—

"I suppose you are thinking I am a regular little red devil. But you don't know what girls do. I've seen a lot of girls all over. And most of 'em, if they travel in a certain class, do just as fool things as that. On the quiet, you understand, and most of them don't get into trouble, either. They marry all right in the end, and become quiet little mammas like you, dear. Sometimes, when they are silly, or weak, or have bad luck, there's trouble. Now, I am not talking loose, as Ted would say. I've known Baltimore girls, and New York girls, and Philadelphia girls, and Boston girls,—and the Boston ones are the worst ever!

"Why should the women be so different from the men, anyway? They are the same flesh and blood as their fathers and brothers, and other girls' fathers and brothers, too.... Don't make that face at me! I'm nice enough, too, at least a little nice. Didn't you ever sit here evenings, or over at the Eversley Club, and watch the nice little girls? But perhaps you couldn't tell what it means when they do things and say things. You ought to get a few points from me or some other girl who is next them. We could tell you what they've been up to ever since they left school, day by day."

The small Francis was rolling over and over on the green turf, rejoicing in the freedom of soiling his white suit. Beyond the polo field a couple on horseback were passing slowly along the curving road into the woods. The cicadas sang their piercing August song among the shrubs. It was a drowsy, decorous scene.

"It isn't all like that," the older woman protested, looking out on the pleasant landscape. "You can choose what you will have."

"Do you think I should do any better if I chose your kind, my dear?" Venetia asked quietly. "Or my mother's? Is Maida Rainbow's conversation an improvement on Ted's? It isn't any more grammatical. And Mrs. Ollie Buchanan's talk is worse than mine. Come now, dear lady, tell me the truth! After several winters by the suburban fireside do you still find your heart beating warmly when hubbie plods up the street at eve in his new auto? Do you advise me to marry Mr. Stephen Lane and transfer my activities to Breathett Lodge,—join the tabby chorus, just to keep the tabbies quiet? Is the married state of all these people you and I know out here to be so much desired?"

"Most of the men and women you know here in Chicago are not bad."

"Oh, no! They're good out here, most of 'em, and dull, damn dull. They're afraid to take off their gloves for fear it isn't the correct thing. A lot of 'em aren't used to good clothes, like that Mrs. Rainbow. As uncle says, 'Our best people are religious and moral.' But there's more going on than you dream of, gray mouse."

"You are too wise, Venetia."

"I'll tell you the reason why we sport. We're dull, and we are looking for some fun. The men get all the excitement they need scrambling for money. Girls want to be sports, too, and they can't do the money act. So they sport—otherwise. That's the why."

She rapped the floor with her whip, and laughed at Helen's perplexity.

"I want to be a real sport, and know what men are like, really, when they are off parade, as you nice women don't know 'em."

"Well, what are they like?"

"Some beasts, some cads, some good fellows," Venetia pronounced definitively. "Do you know why I let men kiss me sometimes? To see if they will, if that sort of thing is all they want of me. And most of 'em do want just that, married or single. When a man has the chance, why, he goes back to the ape mighty quick."

She nodded sagely when Helen laughed at her air of wisdom, and she continued undisturbed:—

"There are some of them now, coming up from the paddock. They have had their little Sunday stroll, and now they want a drink to make them feel cool and comfy, and some conversation with the ladies. We must trot out our prettiest smiles and smoothest talk while they sit tight and are amused."

"And so you think this is all, just these women and men you see here and in other places like this? And the millions and millions of others who are trying to live decent lives, who work and struggle?"

"I talk of those I know, dearie. What are the rest to me? Just dull, ordinary people you never meet except on the street or in the train. We are the top of it all.... I don't care for books and all that sort of thing, or for slumming and playing with the poor. If you knew them, too, I guess you'd find much the same little game going on down there."

"What a horrid world!"

"It is a bit empty," the girl yawned. "I suppose the only thing, after you have had your run, is to marry the decentest man you can find, who won't get drunk, or spend your money, or beat you, and have a lot of children. Yours are awfully nice! I'd like to have the kids without the husband—only that would make such a row!"

"That would please your mother, to have you married."

"Oh, mother! I suppose it would please her to have me marry Mr. Stephen Lane," Venetia answered coldly. "One doesn't talk about one's mother, or I'd like to tell you a thing or two on that head. She needn't worry over me. She's had her fun, and is taking what she can get now."

The group of men and women drew near the club-house. Jackson stopped to speak to a man who had just driven up. Venetia pointed to him derisively.

"There! See Jackie, your good man? He's buzzing old Pemberton, that crusty pillar of society, because he's got a little game to play with him. He's after old Pemby's vote for that school house. You mustn't look so haughty, dear wife. It's your business, too, to be nice to dear Mr. Pemberton. I shall leave you when he comes up, so that you can beguile him with your sweet ways. It's money in thy husband's purse, mouse, and hence in thy children's mouths. Now if we women could scramble for the dollars,—why, we shouldn't want other kinds of mischief. I'd like to be a big broker, like Rainbow, and handle deals, and make the other fellows pay, pay, pay!"

She swung the small Francis over her head and tumbled him in the grass, to the delight of Pete, who hobbled about his mistress, yelping with joy.

There was something hard and final in the girl's summary of her experience. And yet in spite of the obvious injustice of her accusations, Helen felt startled and ashamed before her railing. After all, was there such an infinite distance between the decent lives of herself, her husband, and their friends and the heedless career of this undisciplined girl? Were they governed by finer ends than hers? Vigorous, hot-blooded, and daring, Venetia would have battled among men as an equal, and got from the fight for existence health, and sanity, and joy. As it was, she was rich enough to be protected in the struggle for existence, and was tied down by the prejudices of her class. She was bottled passion!

The architect still held Pemberton in conversation on the drive, and Venetia presently returned to Helen, smiling slyly into her face.

"That doctor man was an amusing chap, wasn't he? I mean Dr. Coburn, the one who mended up Pete when I was a young miss, and outraged mamma by sending her a receipted bill for two hundred and fifty dollars. He asks about you still. Why did you drop him? I always thought that was a bit queer in you, you know. You liked him, but he wasn't your kind, and you dropped him."

"Where have you seen him?" Helen asked evasively.

"Oh, here and there. He writes me pretty often, too. Why not? He was the man who helped me out of that scrape with Teddy. Wouldn't Jackie let you have anything to do with him? Jack is an awful snob, you know."

"Francis didn't like him," Helen admitted a little sadly. "I am afraid I didn't make much of an effort either with him or with that poor Mr. Hussey. It's so hard to do some things, to know people you like when they're out of your path."

Venetia scrutinized the older woman's face and laughed.

"Just so! What did I tell you?"

"How is he?"

"Just as always,—poor, down at the heel and all over, an out-and-out crank."

"How do you meet him?" Helen asked pointedly.

"Sometimes at his hang-out, as he calls it. I've had supper there once or twice with Molly Bascom. You needn't be alarmed. We talk science, and he abuses doctors. He trundled off to Paris or Vienna with that queer machine of his, and got some encouragement over there. You should hear him talk about Europe! Now he's crazy over some new bugs he's found. He may not make good from Jack's point of view. But you see that doesn't prevent me from liking him. He has a great time thinking all by himself. He'd starve himself to death if he had to, to do what he's after. That's the real thing. I offered him money once to help him out."

"Venetia, not that!"

"Yes. I said, 'See here, my friend, I've more of this than I want,' which was a lie. But I was willing to sell a horse or two. 'Help yourself,' I said, 'and when I want it I'll ask you.' I put a cardcase I had with me on the table, stuffed of course. He took it up, took out what was in it, handed the money back, and dropped the case in a drawer. 'None of that,' he said. 'I don't take money from a woman.' I was glad afterward that he didn't take it, though I don't know why—he looked specially hard up. I suppose I might have done it a nicer way, but I thought he would understand and treat me like a little girl, as he always has.... Well, here comes Jack at last."

She gave the architect a hand, which he shook with mock impressiveness.

"How do, Jackie! I've been teaching your domestic angel a thing or two."

"I guess you can't corrupt her."

It was evident that she and Jackson understood each other very well.

CHAPTER XVI

Season shifted into season, and meanwhile an impalpable veil of difference was falling between the architect and his wife. The peaceful days of winter, early spring, and late autumn were precious to the woman—days when the silent processes of nature touched her senses softly, and she could live undisturbed by calls and dinners with their array of familiar faces. Then she heard the birds in the trees behind the house, and listened to the rustling of the tall poplars beneath her windows, and watched the vivid colors of the lake. This harmony of nature, this great enveloping organism of peace, she was beginning to feel, was all that life held for her,—nature and her children, whose wants she fulfilled. Yet ever in the background, not far away, there hung in the horizon that black cloud above the city, which could not wholly be shut out in any revery of country peace. For with it she and her children were linked by all the cords of modern life.

She had felt the sly reproach in Venetia's references to Dr. Coburn. The seedy doctor had drawn her strongly, and yet in the face of her husband's contemptuous indifference to him she had made but one or two feeble attempts to reach him. A few times, also, she had visited the bookbinder's sickly wife, and after the birth of little Francis had revived the class in bookbinding. Jackson had fitted up a studio for the class out of an old teahouse on the bluff, where during mild weather they received their friends in Æsthetic informality. But the class had soon dwindled, the young married women of whom it was composed flitting to other pursuits, and the taciturn bookbinder taking offence at a fancied slight suddenly ceased his visits. Some weeks later when Helen called at the Husseys' rooms to see the wife, she found that they had moved away, and having written Dr. Coburn for their address without success, she had made no further attempt to find them.

Thus ended her efforts to reach that world which lay outside her own circle. More and more, as her married life went on, she had succumbed to the milieu that her husband had chosen. As his struggle for success grew hotter, she, too, in her way, had been absorbed into it, and had become the domestic and social satellite which he needed in his relations with rich clients. And so Venetia's careless defence of herself pricked her. Was there, after all, anything more admirable in the decent life that she and her husband led with its little circle of selfish activities than in the crude outbreaks of Venetia Phillips which had caused so much perturbation in Forest Park? They were not vicious to be sure,—the people she lived with; they were merely dull and negative.

One of these brooding days shortly after the talk on the club veranda, Helen set forth to a neighbor's with a bundle of books and some flowers for Mrs. Buchanan, who was giving a dinner that evening. She had reached the point in the winding road where a long bridge crossed a deep ravine on the level with the topmost branches of lofty trees. At the other end of the bridge a man was standing looking down into the green depths below. He was so much absorbed in the ravine that he did not hear the woman's steps as she drew near. When she passed behind him, he glanced up with a startled look in his black eyes, and grasping the bicycle by his side was moving off.

"Don't you remember me, Mr. Hussey?" Helen asked, holding out her hand. "How are you? I am so glad to see you again. Did you ride out all the way from the city? We don't see many bicycles these days."

She poured forth her little flood of amiable sentences, while the bookbinder stood quietly holding his wheel.

"Yes," he answered slowly, when she paused. "I rode out on my wheel. I wanted to see how the country looked."

He paused and then continued: "Yes, I've been out of the city considerable after my wife died. I went West, to Kansas City. But I came back. I'm used to this place. My woman died here, and the child, too."

"I tried to find you after the class broke up," Helen explained. "I wanted to get your wife to come out here and visit me."

"That was nice and kind of you," he answered dryly.

"I have an errand a little way from here. Won't you go with me and then come back to the house?" she persisted, piqued by his tone.

"Thank you, I don't believe I will. It's time I was starting back to the city."

"You had better rest awhile first."

"I ain't particularly tired. You are very good. What do you want me to come for?" he asked abruptly, and then continued to speak as if he were talking to himself: "You and I ain't the same kind of folks. We are placed different on this earth, and there's no getting away from the fact. It's best for us both to keep where we belong."

"Nonsense!" she retorted.

"As I have looked about among folks," he went on calmly, "I've seen that's the best way, in the long run—for the rich and the poor to keep to themselves. That's why you didn't see nothing of me after the ladies got tired of binding books. Not that I've got anything against those better fortuned than me. It's just the way things are made to run. So long as the present order lasts, man is divided from man—and that's all there is to it. The only use the poor man has for the rich man is to get work from him and some pay for it. The only use the rich man has for the poor man is to get his work done. And they'd better do their business apart, as far apart as they can."

"My husband isn't rich. We have to struggle, too."

Hussey smiled sceptically.

"I had all I could do when the woman was living to keep a decent room or two, and find enough to eat. There's some difference between us, ain't there? And I don't speak like you, and maybe I eat different at the table."

"That's all very important," Helen laughed.

"It's the little things that separate, not the big ones. You look around your own kind of folks and see if that's not so. It's just the silly scraps of ways that keep man from man."

"Well, it's too good a day to quarrel about that. At least, you and I can both enjoy those trees down there."

A victoria came toward them at a lively trot, making the wooden planking resound. The lady in the carriage leaned forward and bowed to Helen, and then cast a second, longer glance at her companion.

"She's wanting to know who that man is you're talking to," Hussey remarked ironically. "No, them trees and the country in general ain't the same to me and you. You folks squat right out here and buy up all the land you can lay your hands on, at least all that can be got at easily from the city. Perhaps, though, some day it will be different, and the beautiful parts of the country will be kept for all to have."

They began to cross the bridge, and Helen holding the man in talk wiled him as far as her own gate, with an unreasoning determination to make him come into her house.

"I suppose I ought to take that bundle there," Hussey observed as they walked, pointing to the parcel that Helen held in her hand.

"It's nothing."

"I notice that don't make any difference among your kind. Your men folks may let their women suffer in other ways, but they fetch and carry for you in public."

"Yes—that's so," Helen laughed.

"That bundle ain't nothing for you to carry. You wouldn't have started out with it if it had been. It's the same way about giving a woman a seat in a car. If she looks as if she needed it, why a humane man would give her his seat the same as he would to a tired man. But most times the man needs it more."

"You wouldn't have wanted your wife to stand?"

"Well, she weren't never real well, not after the child came."

He spoke more gently, and added without any polite delicacy, "There must have been something wrong happened then, for she got up weak, and couldn't bear children no more."

"You miss her!"

"Yes, sometimes, when work's plenty, and I feel strong, and there's something for her to live for. Most times I think it's just as well she's gone. And the child, too," he added softly. "You see it ain't as it is with you, with a working-man and his wife. They don't have so much love and notions, maybe. That don't stand long after the first weeks. The man's got to work and the woman, too. If she's a pretty-looking girl when he marries her, sweet and fresh, them looks don't last long. It's like anything you use all the time. There's no chance to lay it by and let it freshen up. Now you and my wife were about of an age, I judge. But she looked to be the mother of you, before she died. You are as pretty as you ever was or more so, and men would court you to-day if you were single. It wasn't so with my woman, and I did the best I could for her, too. Don't you suppose a working-man hates to see his wife grow old, through hard work and no chance to freshen up? He mayn't be as nice in his tastes as your sort, but he don't like to see his wife wear out."

Romantic love, so he seemed to hold, was one of the luxuries of the expensive classes. While he was talking they passed into the driveway and came to the house. Hussey finally got to the veranda, where he sat stiffly on the edge of a large steamer chair, holding his derby hat in his two hands. After a time he deposited the hat on the floor and gradually slipped into the comfortable depths of the chair and talked on more freely.

There was nothing new or wise in the bookbinder's talk. Yet certain things that he said, furtive, flame-like words of revolt which contained half truths, sank into Helen's receptive mind: "Man pays pretty high for his civilization, as he calls it, and what does he get for it? The police station and the fire department." "The Bible says that man must be born again. Yes—that's so! With a new kind of belly that knows when it's had enough." "The labor question always comes down to cutting the pie: because a man with one kind of a brain can think faster than his neighbor, ought he to get a bigger slice? Does he need it to make him think?"

There was a vein of character in the man himself, a passionate faith in a vision of society other than that which holds to-day. His talk was not vindictive, or greedy, or envious, but he assumed calmly that the present state of society was wasteful and unjust, and that already, here and there, men and women were beginning to wake from the individualistic nightmare and were ready to try an altogether new manner of living together.

"I get tired," he said in answer to a platitude that Helen made, "hearing what some folks are kind enough to do for society—how necessary they are to make it run. Don't you believe it, not for one second! If we could take account of stock in some way, and find out just what mere brains are good for and how much they do in gettin' food and clothes and shelter, I guess we'd put brains lower down. And what's more, if the only way you can get the best work out of smart men is to let them hog it, then human nature must be a pretty poor sort of outfit, and we'd better all starve. But the best workmen I've known didn't work because they had to: it was in 'em from the beginning of time to work better than the others."

The boys came home presently from a children's party at a neighbor's. They were dressed very prettily in white, with large collars of absurd shape and size. They wore neat little leather yachting caps with the names of men-of-war gaudily embossed in gold cord about the rims.

"They're healthy-looking chaps," Hussey observed as each one politely gave him a hand. "That's what rich folks can do for their children, if they've got good blood in 'em to start with. You can buy them the proper food and put them in cool, big rooms, and plant 'em out here in the country."

"Yes, I am on a committee of women that has charge of a country home," Helen answered idly.

"Charity?" He pronounced the word ironically. "Well, I must be starting. It will be dark before I get halfway to the city."

He rose and took a long look at the blue lake.

"This'll have to last me some time. It's been mighty pleasant sitting here on your piazza and jawing away about these big things, Mrs. Hart."

"You'd better come again, then."

"Well, maybe I'll be riding out this way sometime. But you remember what I said about mixing! You stick to your side of the fence, and I'll try to stick to mine."

"Suppose I'm not altogether content with my side?"

"I guess you'll have to grin and bear it. I don't reckon to spend much time pitying you. It looks to me rather pretty on your side."

As they were shaking hands, the chug of an automobile could be heard in the roadway.

"That must be my husband!" Helen exclaimed. "Won't you wait a minute and see him?"

The heavy, lumbering machine with its ugly fat wheels rolled up the driveway, and after a final heave and sigh came to a stand before the veranda. The driver leaped down and opened the little door in the rear for his master to descend. The architect was smoking a cigar and carried in his arms a heavy bag of papers and books.

"Hello, Nell!" he called cheerily, and then looked inquiringly at the man beside her.

"Francis, this is Mr. Hussey. You remember Mr. Hussey who gave us lessons in bookbinding?"

"How do you do?" The architect greeted Hussey with a pleasant nod. "Very glad to see you again."

He held out his free hand in the simple, cordial fashion that made him popular in his office and with the foremen on his buildings. He always made a point of being genial with working people. He got more out of them that way and often avoided friction. He usually carried about with him a handful of black and strong cigars, which he dealt out on the slightest occasion.

"Sit down again, won't you?" he remarked. "Have a cigar?"

He pulled out one of the proper variety from his inner pocket.

"I don't smoke," the bookbinder replied shortly.

He made no further remark, and the architect, also, found himself at the end of his cordiality. Helen realized that the two men had nothing whatsoever to talk about. Jackson could have discussed bindings in a dilettante fashion, meaning certain rich and costly specimens of the art that wealthy amateurs bought and locked up in cabinets, but he knew nothing about the ordinary trade.

"Mr. Hussey rode out from the city on a bicycle," Helen explained. "I met him on the bridge and induced him to come up here and rest for a little while."

"Yes, it's hot," Jackson answered. "Fearfully hot on the train from Indianapolis this morning. I haven't been cool all day until Fred let out the machine coming over from the station."

Hussey looked at the lumbering automobile sighing to itself below the veranda, and then at the chauffeur, who was waiting for orders.

"Good day," he said abruptly. "It's some longer to the city on a wheel than in one of them affairs."

Helen walked down the steps with her guest in a vague desire to be cordial. He mounted his wheel, and bending his little body over the frame, pedalled swiftly out of the driveway. Helen watched him for a moment, feeling that he would not call again, as she hoped he might. He had merely wandered their way this bright summer day like a chance stranger from some vast outer world,—a world that perpetually teased her spirit.

"What is he, Nell? Socialist or anarchist?" Jackson called out good-humoredly, when his wife returned to the veranda.

It was one of his jokes that his wife dabbled in socialism.

"I wish he would have stayed to dinner."

"But we're going out."

"Yes, I know. But he wouldn't have stayed anyway."

Her husband looked at her inquiringly, yet he was not sufficiently interested in Mr. Hussey to frame a question. He poured himself a glass of water, drank it, and when he set the glass down, the bookbinder had been washed into complete oblivion.

"Come! It must be time to dress," he said briskly.

CHAPTER XVII

The Harts were to dine at the Elisha Stewarts' that evening, and the architect had considered this engagement of sufficient importance to bring him back to Chicago all the way from Indianapolis. Elisha Stewart had made his money many years ago, when he commanded a vessel on the lakes, by getting control of valuable ore properties. The Elisha Stewarts had lived in Shoreham for nearly a generation, and were much considered,—very good people, indeed. Their rambling, old-fashioned white house, with a square cupola projecting from the roof, was one of the village landmarks. The place was surrounded by a grove of firs set out by Elisha himself when he built the house.

It was a large dinner, and most of the guests, who were of the older set, were already assembled in the long drawing-room when Helen and Jackson arrived. The people in the room were all talking very earnestly about a common topic.

"It's the Crawfords," Mrs. Stewart murmured asthmatically into Helen's ear. "You know they find his affairs in such a frightful tangle. They say there won't be much left."

"Indeed!" Jackson exclaimed sympathetically.

"Anthony wasn't all right, not fit for business for more than a year before he died," Colonel Raymond was saying to the group. "And he snarled things up pretty well by what I hear."

"That slide in copper last March must have squeezed him."

"Squeezed? I should say it did."

"It wasn't only copper."

"No, no, it wasn't only copper," assented several men.

Among the women, the more personal application of the fact was openly made.

"Poor old Anthony! It must have troubled him to know there wasn't one of his family who could look out for himself. Morris was a pleasant fellow, but after he got out of Harvard he never seemed to do much. It will come hard on Linda."

"What has the youngest boy been up to lately?"

"The same thing, I guess."

"I heard he'd been doing better since he went on the ranch."

"He couldn't get into much trouble out there."

"Isn't there anything left?"

"Oh, the widow will have a little. But the in-laws will have to hunt jobs. One is out in California, isn't he?"

The company did not seem able to get away from the topic. Even after they went out to dinner, it echoed to and fro around the table.

"I say it's a shame, a crime!" Mr. Buchanan pronounced with confident earnestness. "A man with that sort of family has no right to engage in speculative enterprises without settling a proper sum on his family first. There's his eldest daughter married to an invalid, his youngest daughter engaged to be married to a parson, and neither of his sons showing any business ability."

"That's a fact, Oliver," Mr. Stewart nodded. "But you know Anthony always loved deep water."

"And now it's his family who have got to swim in it."

"He was a most generous man," Pemberton remarked in a milder tone. "I hardly know of a man who's done more first and last for this town, and no one ever had to ask twice for his help in any public enterprise."

"Seems to have looked after other people's affairs better'n his own. It's a pity now the boys weren't brought up to business."

"That isn't the way nowadays. He was always ready for a gamble, and she didn't want her sons in the business."

From time to time there were feeble efforts to move the talk out of the rut in which it had become fixed. But the minds of most of those about the table were fascinated by the spectacle of ruin so closely presented to them. The picture of a solid, worldly estate crumbling before their eyes stirred their deepest emotions. For the moment it crowded out that other great topic of the new strike in the building trades. Every one at the table held substantially the same views on both these matters, but the ruin of the Crawford fortune was more immediately dramatic than the evils of unionism.

"When are you fellows going to start that school, Pemberton?" some one asked at last.

"Not until these strikes let up, and there's no telling when that will be. If these labor unions only keep on long enough, they will succeed in killing every sort of enterprise."

"Yes, they're ruining business."

Then Pemberton, who was seated next to Helen, remarked to her:—

"You will be glad to know, Mrs. Hart, that the trustees have decided not to hand the work over to any institution, at least for the present."

"I am so glad of that," she replied.

"That's about as far as we have got."

Sensitively alive to her former blunder in expressing her wish that her husband might draw the plans for the school, she took this as a hint, and dropped the subject altogether, although she had a dozen questions on the tip of her tongue.

She noticed that Jackson, who was seated between Mrs. Stewart and Mrs. Phillips, was drinking a good deal of champagne. She thought that he was finding the dinner as intolerably dull as she found it, for he rarely drank champagne. When the women gathered in the drawing-room for coffee, the topic of the Crawfords' disaster had reached the anecdotal stage.

"Poor Linda! Do you remember how she hated Chicago? She's been living at Cannes this season, hasn't she? I suppose she'll come straight home now. Does she own that place in the Berkshires?"

"No, everything was in his name."

"He was one of the kind who would keep everything in his own hands."

"Even that ranch doesn't belong to Ted, I hear."

"My, what a tragedy it is!"

There seemed to be no end to the talk about the lost money. Helen sat limply in her chair. The leaden dulness of the dinner-talk, the dead propriety and conventionality of the service, the dishes, the guests, had never before so whelmed her spirit as they did to-night. These good people were stung into unusual animation because a man had died leaving his family not poor, but within sight of poverty. For poverty is the deadliest spectre to haunt the merchant class at their lying down and at their uprising.

When the men came in, murmuring among themselves fragments of the same topic, Helen felt as though she might shriek out or laugh hysterically, and as soon as she could she clutched her husband, just as he was sitting down beside Mrs. Pemberton.

"Take me away, Francis. It's awful," she whispered.

"What's the matter?" he asked in quick concern. "Don't you feel well?"

"Yes, yes, I am all right. No, I am tired. My head aches. Can't we leave? I shall do something silly—come!"

As they got into their carriage, he demanded, "What was the matter?"

"Nothing,—just the awful dulness of it,—such people,—such talk, talk, talk about poor Mr. Crawford's money!"

"I thought the crowd was all right," he grumbled. "The best out here—what was the matter? Your nerves must be wrong."

"Yes, my nerves are wrong," she assented.

Then they were silent, and from the heat, fatigue, and champagne he relapsed into a doze on the way home. But when they reached the house he woke up briskly enough and began to talk of the dinner again:—

"Nell, Mrs. Phillips was speaking to me to-night about Venetia. She's worried to death over the girl. The men say pretty rough things about her, you know. Little fool! She'd better marry Lane if he wants her still, and keep quiet."

"Like mother, like daughter," Helen replied dryly. "And of the two I prefer the daughter."

"What makes you say that? Louise is all right; just likes to have her hand squeezed now and then."

"Phew!" Helen exclaimed impatiently.

There was something so short and hard in his wife's voice that Jackson looked at her in surprise. They went to their dressing-room; now that he had got his eyes open once more he made no haste to go to bed. There was something he wanted to say to his wife which needed delicate phrasing. He lit a cigarette and leaned back against the open window, through which the night air was drawing gently. After a little time he remarked:—

"The judge was talking some about the school. They are getting ready to build as soon as the strikes are settled. Has Everett said anything to you about it?"

"Not lately. I haven't seen him since we were at the Buchanans'. Why?"

"Why! I am counting on Everett, and the last time I saw him he seemed to me to be side-stepping. I've seen Pemberton once or twice, but he always avoids the subject. I asked him point-blank to-night what their plans were, and he said the papers had everything that had been settled. He's a stiff one! I saw you were talking to him. Did he say anything about the school?"

Helen, who had been moving about the room here and there, preparing to undress, suddenly stood quite still. The memory of her remark to Pemberton that morning on the train swept over her again, coloring her cheeks. She answered the question after a moment of hesitation:—

"Yes, he spoke about their not giving the money to the university, but that was all. And I didn't like to ask questions."

"Oh!" Jackson murmured in a disappointed tone. "You might have drawn him out. He's likely to have a good deal to say about what is done. The judge is down on me, never liked me since I built for Louise—thinks I stuck her, I suppose. Wasn't his money, though. Hollister is on the fence; he'll do what Everett tells him. It rests with Pemberton, mostly."

Helen turned toward where he was standing and asked swiftly, "Why do you want them to give it to you so much?"

"Why?" The architect opened his mouth in astonishment. "Don't you know the size of the thing? They're going to spend a million or more on the school, put up one large building or several smaller ones. It's a chance that doesn't come every week to do a great public building."

She had begun to unhook her dress, and her nervous fingers tangled the lace about the hooks. Jackson, seeing her predicament, put down his cigarette and stepped forward to help her. But she swerved away from him unconsciously, tugging at the lace until it broke loose from the hook.

"Francis!" she exclaimed, with a kind of solemnity. "You would not do it for money, just like any ordinary building?"

"And why not?" he asked, puzzled. "Am I drawing plans for fun these days? I'll tell you what, Nell, I need the money, and I need it badly. Something must turn up, and right away. Since the strikes began there hasn't been much new business coming into the office, of course, and it costs us a lot to live as we do. That's plain enough."

"We can live differently. I've often thought it would be better if we did, too."

"But I don't want to live differently. That's nonsense!"

They were silent for a little while before their unfinished thoughts. He broke the silence first:—

"Perhaps I ought to tell you that I've been caught in an—investment, some stocks I bought. A friend of mine advised me, a broker who is in with Rainbow. But the thing went wrong. I don't believe those fellows know as much as the man outside. Well, instead of making a good thing by it, I must find ten or twelve thousand dollars, and find it mighty quick. Now if I get this commission, I can borrow the money all right. I know who will let me have it. And then by the end of the year it will straighten out. And the next time I go to buy stocks, well—"

"But that building—the school?" Helen interrupted. She pulled a thin dressing-sack over her shoulders and sat down on the edge of the bed, looking breathlessly into his face. What he had said about his losses in the stock market had made no impression on her. "That work is uncle Powers's gift, his legacy to the people. You can't do it just to make money out of it!"

"Why not?" he demanded shortly, and then added, with a dry little laugh: "I should say that building rather than any other. I'd like to pick up a few crumbs from the old man's cake. It's only common justice, seeing he did me out of all the rest."

She stared at him with bewildered eyes. Perhaps she was not a very quick woman, if after five years of daily contact with her husband she did not know his nature. But the conceptions she had cherished of him were too deep to be effaced at once. She could not even yet understand what he meant.

"'Did you out of all the rest'?" she queried in a low voice.

"Yes!" he exclaimed hardily. "And I think the trustees should take it into consideration that I didn't contest the will when I had the best kind of case and could have given them no end of trouble. I was a fool to knuckle under so quickly. I might at least have had an agreement with them about this matter."

"So," she said, "you want to build the school to make up what you think uncle should have given you?"

"You needn't put it just like that. But I need every cent I can make. The bigger the building, the better for me. And I can do it as well for them as anybody. They're probably thinking of having a competition, and asking in a lot of fellows from New York and Boston. They ought to keep it in this city, anyway, and then the only man I'd hate to run up against would be Wright. He's got some mighty clever new men in his office."

He talked on as he stripped off his coat and waistcoat and hung them neatly on the clothes-tree, permitting her to see all the consideration he had given to his chances for securing this big commission. Evidently he had been turning it over and over in his mind, and he was desperately nervous lest he might lose what he had counted on having all along ever since his marriage. He refrained from telling his wife that he felt she had seconded him feebly in this matter; for she knew the judge, and Pemberton, and Everett, too, a great deal better than he did. They had always paid her rather marked attention.

Helen said nothing. There was nothing in her surprised and grieved heart to be said. For the first time she saw clearly what manner of man her husband was. She knew how he felt about his uncle. He was vindictive about him, and seemed to welcome this job as a chance to get even with the old man for slighting him in his will. For some reason unknown to her he had not tried at the time of his death to break his will and show his ingratitude, and now he regretted that he had displayed so much forbearance.

This sudden sight of the nakedness of the man she loved dulled her heart so that she could not view the thing simply. It was impossible for her to see that there was nothing very dreadful in her husband's attitude, nothing more than a little ordinary human selfishness, sharpened by that admirable system of civilized self-interest which our philosophers and statesmen so delight to praise. She had been dreaming that her husband might have the honor to design this great building as a testimonial, a monument of gratitude, to the man who had succored his youth, who had given him his education! Her sentiment turned rancid in her heart.

"Now if Everett or the judge should say anything to you, give you a chance, you know what it means to me," Jackson remarked finally, as he put his boots outside the door for the man to get in the morning. He had meant to say more than this, to point out to her in detail the service she could do them both. Something in her manner, however, restrained him, and he contented himself with this final hint.

But Helen had stepped back into the dressing-room and did not hear him. When she returned her husband was already in bed, and his eyelids were closed in sleep. She placed herself beside him and turned out the light.

She lay there a long, long time, her open eyes staring upward into the darkness, her arms stretched straight beside her, as she used to lie when she was a little child, and her nurse had told her to be good and not to stir. Something strange had happened that day, something impalpable, unnamable, yet true, and of enormous importance to the woman. The man who lay there beside her, her husband, the indivisible part of her, had been suddenly cut from her soul, and was once more his own flesh—some alien piece of clay, and ever so to be.

She did not cry or moan. She was too much stunned. All the little petty manifestations of character, unobserved through those five years of marriage, were suddenly numbered and revealed to her. It was not a question of blame. They declared themselves to her as finalities, just as if she had suddenly discovered that her husband had four toes instead of five. He was of his kind, and she was of her kind. Being what she was, she could no longer worship him, being what he was. And her nature craved the privilege of worship. That thin, colorless protestantism of her fathers had faded into a nameless moralism. She had no Christ before whom she could pour her adoration and love. Instead, she had taken to herself a man; and now the clay of his being was crumbling in her hands....

Outside the room the lake began to clamor on the sands beneath the bluff. It called her by its insistent moan. She rose from the bed and stepped out upon the little balcony that looked eastward from their room. The warm night was filled with a damp mist that swathed the tree trunks to their branches and covered the slow-moving waves of the lake. Through this earth fog there was moving a current from some distant point, touching the sleeping town.

All the unquiet feelings that latterly had been rising in her soul—Venetia's bold challenge, Hussey's harsh words, her own dissatisfaction with the empty life of getting and spending—now hardened into judgment. The poor bookbinder was right: it was useless, perhaps, to mix the two orders of life,—those that labor for mere living and those that labor for luxury. But here in the superb indifference of nature she knew herself to be kin with him, the man of the people, the common man, whose lot it was to labor for his scanty bread. Surely a new order of the world was to be born, wherein the glory of life should not be for the ferocious self-seekers, wherein all that was fine in man should not be tainted with greed!

She held her arms out to the mist, vaguely, blindly, demanding some compensation for living, some justification that she knew not of. And there in the vigil of the misty night the woman was born. From a soft, yielding, dreaming, feminine thing, there was born a new soul—definite, hard, and precise in its judgment of men and life....

In the house behind her slept her husband and her two boys,—her children and his. But only in the words of the sentimentalists are children a sufficient joy to woman's heart. Loving as she was by nature, nevertheless she asked more of God than her two boys, whose little lives no longer clung to hers by the bonds of extreme infancy. They were growing to become men; they, too, like her husband, would descend into the market for the game which all men play. The fear of it gripped her heart.

And at last she wept, miserably, for the forlorn wreck of her worship, longing for the glorious man she had once adored.

The next morning she said to her husband:—

"Francis, I want to go back to the city this winter."

"Well—there's time to think of it—you may change your mind by the fall."

She said no more, but the first step in her new life had been taken.

CHAPTER XVIII

Everett Wheeler could hardly be reckoned as a man of sentiment. Yet in the matter of selecting an architect for the new school he stood out persistently against the wishes of Pemberton and Judge Phillips, with but one sentimental argument,—the Powers Jackson trustees must give the commission for building the great school to the nephew of the founder, without holding a competitive trial of any sort.

"It's only square," he insisted. "Jackson was disappointed about the will. He had some grounds for feeling badly used, too. He might have made us a good deal of trouble at the time, and he didn't."

"Powers would think it queer to pass him by," Hollister urged also, "seeing he gave the boy a first-class education to be an architect. And he's a hustling, progressive fellow from all I hear. I must say I admire the way he's settled into the collar since his uncle died. Why shouldn't we give him this boost?"

These remarks were made at one of the many informal meetings of the trustees, which were held almost daily now that the plans for the school were shaping themselves toward action. Pemberton, with whom the others happened to be taking their luncheon, glanced sharply at Wheeler. Although not given to suspecting his neighbors of indirect motives, Pemberton understood Wheeler well enough to know that when the lawyer fell back upon sentiment there must be another motive in the background. The close relationship between the men was not sufficient to account wholly for the cold lawyer's unexpected zeal in behalf of the young architect. Everett Wheeler was not one to be moved by family ties. Pemberton had not forgotten Mrs. Hart's sudden interest in this commission, which he had attributed to an unwise eagerness for her husband's profit. It occurred to him now that he had once heard in past years of Everett Wheeler's devotion to Nellie Spellman.

"I can't see that it follows that we should put this plum into his mouth," the judge remarked testily. "If Powers had wanted to give the chap any more money, he would have left it to him. You must excuse me, Everett, for speaking my mind about your cousin; but, frankly, I don't altogether like the fellow. He's too smooth, too easy with all the world."

"That's all right, judge. I'm not urging him because he's my cousin. But we know why you are down on him," Wheeler answered, with a smile. "He did let your sister-in-law in for a good deal."

"Well, it isn't just that. Of course he was beginning then, and wanted to make his first job as big as possible—that's natural enough. And I guess Louise— Well, it's her affair. She manages her own property, and I wouldn't let her spend any of the children's money. But I don't like Hart's methods. Raymond was telling me the other day how he worked him for that railroad job—through—through a woman. I suppose it's all right; the man must get business where he can. It's hard for youngsters to make a living these days. But to get a woman to pull off a thing like that for you! And Raymond told me they had to drop him, too—he didn't do the work economically, or something of the sort."

"I guess there's another story to that, perhaps," Wheeler answered patiently. "Jack wasn't willing to let Bushfield make all he wanted to off the contracts. I happen to know that. And I don't see why you should have it in for him because he got a lady to say a good word for him with Raymond. You know well enough that pretty nearly all the big commissions for public buildings in this city have gone by favor,—family or social or political pull. It's got to be so. You're bound to think that the man you know is bigger than the other fellow you don't know."

"That is not a good reason, Mr. Wheeler, why we should do the same thing in this case," Pemberton objected stiffly. "It would have been well for American architecture if it had happened less often. The proper way in the case of all public buildings is to hold an open competition."

"Well, we won't argue that question. But this is a special case. Here is a man who happens to be a nephew of the founder, who knows more of our plans than any other architect, naturally, and can give us pretty much all his attention. He'll push the work faster."

"We can wait," Pemberton still demurred. "There is no need for undue haste."

"No, no, John," Judge Phillips protested. "I am getting to be an old man. I want to see the school started and feel that my duty's done. We've thrashed this out long enough. Let us try Hart and be done with it."

Pemberton had been added to their number at the suggestion of the judge, because of his well-known public spirit and his interest in educational and philanthropic enterprises. He had undertaken his duties with his accustomed energy and conscientiousness, and at times wearied even the judge with his scruples. The others had rather hazy ideas as to the exact form, educationally, that the large fund in their charge should assume. Wheeler concerned himself mainly with the financial side of the trust. Hollister, who had got his education in a country school, and Judge Phillips, who was a graduate of a small college, merely insisted that the school should be "practical," with "no nonsense." After they had rejected the plan of handing over the bequest to a university, Pemberton had formed the idea of founding a technological school, modelled closely after certain famous Eastern institutions. This conception Helen had somewhat disturbed by her talk with him, in which she had vigorously presented the founder's democratic ideas on education. Her views had set him to thinking on the problem once more, and he had discussed the matter with the intimate friends of the founder, seeking to discover the old man's real purpose in his benefaction.

In his perplexity Pemberton had gone East to see the president of a university, of which he was one of the trustees, and there he had met a professor in the scientific department, one Dr. Everest, a clever organizer of educational enterprises. Dr. Everest did not find it difficult to convince the puzzled trustee that his dilemma was an imaginary one, that all warring ideals of education might be easily "harmonized" by a little judicious "adjustment." There should be some domestic science for the girls, manual training combined with technical and commercial courses for the boys, and all would be right, especially if the proper man were employed to mix these ingredients. In brief, the doctor came to Chicago at the invitation of the trustees, looked over the ground, and spoke at several public dinners on the "ideals of modern education." His eloquent denunciation of a "mediÆval" education, his plea for a business education for a business people, and especially his alert air and urbane manners convinced the trustees that they had found a treasure. Dr. Everest was invited to become the head of the new school, which was to be called the JACKSON INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTE.

Hart attended one of the dinners where the new director spoke, and afterward engaged Dr. Everest in a long conversation about the new school. They found themselves agreed that it ought to be housed "monumentally," whatever happened. Later, Dr. Everest spoke warmly to Pemberton of the intelligent young architect, whom he understood might be asked to design the building. His views, he said, were "progressive" and "inspiring," and Jackson praised the director warmly to his wife; but Helen, who had read all his utterances in the papers, felt that the clever doctor, however much of an "educator" he might be, knew absolutely nothing about the one class in the community he had been engaged to work for. His ideas about education were strictly those of the merchant class, the only class in America that the "higher education" concerned itself with.

However all that might be, Dr. Everest's good word, more than Wheeler's persistency, prevailed against Pemberton's prejudices. The architect was in a fair way of winning the long-coveted prize.

When Everett Wheeler had finally obtained the consent of his associates to ask the architect to meet the trustees and the new director and discuss plans for the building, the lawyer was so pleased that he broke an engagement for dinner, and took the train to Forest Park instead. He might have telephoned the architect at his office, but, sluggish as he was temperamentally, he had long promised himself the pleasure of telling Helen personally the good news. Of late she had not seemed wholly happy, and he supposed that there were money troubles in the household which would now be relieved.

He found a number of people in the studio on the bluff, and sat down patiently to wait. It had been a warm day, and the men and women were lounging comfortably on the grass mats, gossiping and enjoying the cool air from the lake. Jackson was in high spirits, telling Irish stories, a social gift which he had recently cultivated. Wheeler found himself near Venetia Phillips, who was nursing a sprained elbow, the result of being pitched against a fence by a vicious horse.

"Why don't you go over there and try your charms on Helen?" she asked Wheeler peevishly. "She's been out of sorts all this summer. When you see the solemn way good married women take their happiness, it doesn't encourage you to try your luck and be good. I wonder if she and Jackie scrap? She looks as if she had a very dull life."

"Are you thinking of trying your chances?" the lawyer asked with a heavy attempt at the flippant tone. "You ought to have let me know."

"Do you mean that as an offer? Does it lead up to anything?"

"I'll put it in legal form, if you will give me the chance."

"Should I consent to be bored with one Everett Wheeler, a lawyer, specially successful in making bad corporations, something of a politician, not yet fifty, no known vices, easy with women? Is that the question?"

"You flatter me."

"Wait a moment. I want a good man—a blue-ribbon, high-geared saint; or something equally clever of the other kind. Are you good enough?"

"Well, I guess I could pass with the rest."

"That's the trouble. You are just about up to the average of the crowd. You wouldn't steal, and you wouldn't run away with any one's wife. You're too knowing; it wouldn't pay."

"You're right there!"

"And if I get into trouble any time, you're just the man I'd go to. You wouldn't make remarks of a moral nature, and you would know how to squeeze me through a little hole. But you wouldn't do to marry."

"Oh, I don't know—I'd be easy."

"Too tolerant—that's the trouble."

"You are a wise young woman."

"Yes, I'm very wise about men. I'm going to write a book about men I have known well. It will be read, too. Do you want to go in?"

"Well, let's drop me. What about Helen and Jack? What's the matter?"

"I can't make out exactly. Unsatisfied aspirations, or something of the sort. I should guess that our Jackson doesn't come up to specifications. She sighs for the larger world. Did you ever meet a chap who used to give lessons in binding paper books? That was some years ago, when earnest ladies were all trying to do something with their hands to revive the arts and crafts. His name was Hussey. He was a poor, thin little man, with a wife dying from consumption or something of the sort. I have always thought Helen wanted to run away with Mr. Hussey, but couldn't get up her courage. They used to talk socialism and anarchy and strikes until the air was red, so Maida told me. It was sport to see him and Jackson get together. Jack would offer him a cigar,—the bad kind he keeps for the men on his buildings. Hussey would turn him down, and then Helen would ask the bookbinder to luncheon or dinner, and that would give Jack a fit. But Hussey wouldn't stay. He had ideas about the masses not mixing with the classes until the millennium comes. Helen would argue with him, but it was no use. He thought nothing was on the square. Well, one day he got huffy about something Jack said, so Maida says, and went off and never turned up again at the class. Helen tried to find him; I don't think she ever got over it. And only the other day she ran across him again, Jack told me. I believe that Hussey was the man for her. She is another unsatisfied soul. I am going now, and you had better try to cheer her up."

It was beyond the lawyer's power, however, to penetrate Helen's mood. She seemed curiously removed from the scene. The banter and talk of the people on the veranda passed over her unheeded; while her eyes rested dreamily on the trees, among which the summer twilight was stealing. To rouse her attention, Wheeler brought forth his news.

"I came out here to tell you something, Nell," he said.

"What is it?" she asked indifferently.

"Jack is going to build the school. It has just been decided to-day."

She gave a little start, as though his words brought her back to the present, but she said nothing.

"The trustees have come around to it at last. You know Pemberton and the judge wanted a public competition, or something of the kind."

"Why don't they have a competition?" she asked quickly. And aroused suddenly, with nervous animation, as if she resented the suggestion of a special favor, she continued, "It would be much fairer to have an open competition!"

"Why should we? Isn't Jack the old man's nephew?"

She made no reply, and he said nothing more, dampened by the way she took his splendid news. In a little while the others left and they had dinner. Wheeler expected Helen would tell her husband of the decision, but she seemed to have forgotten it. So, finally, he was forced to repeat his announcement. He dropped it casually and coldly:—

"Well, Jack, we're getting that school business cleared up. Can you meet the trustees and the doctor at my office some day this week?"

Jackson bubbled over with glee.

"Hoorah!" he shouted. "Good for you, Everett! We must have up some champagne."

The lawyer, watching Helen's impassive face, felt inclined to moderate Jackson's enthusiasm.

"Of course, nothing's settled as to the commission. You'll be asked to prepare sketches after you have consulted with Dr. Everest. That's all."

That was enough for the architect. He thought that he could satisfy the director, and if he succeeded with him, the rest of the way was clear. When the champagne came, he pressed his thanks on his cousin.

"It's awfully good of you, Everett. I know all the trouble you have taken for me in this matter. You'll have to let me build that camp in the Adirondacks this fall. My heavens!" he went on, too excited to be cautious, "you don't know what a load it takes off my shoulders! I can feel myself free once more. It's a big thing, the first big thing that's come my way since I began. How much do the trustees mean to put into the building?"

"That depends," the lawyer answered cautiously. "It will be over half a million, anyway, I should suppose—maybe nearer a million."

"It's a great opportunity!" the architect exclaimed, conscious that the more elevated and ideal aspects of the subject were slipping out of sight. "It doesn't come every day, the chance to build a monument like the school."

"You're quite right," Wheeler assented.

In his excitement, Hart left his seat and began to pace the floor, his hands twisting his napkin nervously. Meanwhile Helen was watching the bubbles break in her champagne glass. Her face had remained utterly blank, although she seemed to be listening to her husband. Perhaps, thought the lawyer, she did not realize what this news meant. So he remarked deliberately:—

"It's a big commission, fast enough, if you get it, and there's no reason why you shouldn't have it. I don't know of another young fellow in your line in this city who's had the same chance to make his reputation at one stroke."

Even this did not rouse the wife to speech. A flush stole over her face at the lawyer's words; but her eyes remained buried in the champagne glass, which she twirled gently between her fingers, thus keeping up the effervescence. Jackson was jubilant enough for two.

"Dr. Everest and I were talking about the site the other day," he said. "You have only two blocks. There should be four, at least. You must give dignity to the main building by some kind of approach. The thing should be done in stone, if possible. But if that's too costly, we might try a glazed tile; you can get very good effects in that. But stone, of course, is the proper thing."

"You may find the judge and Pemberton pretty stubborn on matters of detail," Wheeler remarked cautiously.

But the architect flirted his napkin buoyantly. He had dealt with building committees before, and he had found that trustees usually took their duties lightly.

"Well, what do you think of it, Nell?" the lawyer asked finally.

"Oh! I?" She looked up blankly from the glass of wine. "It is a great chance, of course."

This joyless attitude, unremarked by her husband, caused Wheeler to suspect that there were deeper troubles in this household than money worries.

After a little more talk in which Helen did not take part the lawyer left to take his train for the city, and Jackson walked to the station with him. When he returned he found Helen still sitting at the empty table. His eyes were aflame with the golden light of opportunity. He put his hand over his wife's shoulder and pressed her cheek affectionately.

"It's great, isn't it, Nell?" he said.

She looked up into his face with a wistful smile. The good news had changed him wonderfully, even in this brief hour, erasing already some lines from his face. It seemed as if his nature was not one to grow strong in the storms of life, but needed, rather, the warmth of prosperity.

"It's great, isn't it?" he repeated, desiring to savor the good fortune with her.

"Yes, Francis," she replied slowly, and added almost pleadingly, "and you must do it greatly."

"Of course," he assented cheerily. "It'll be the best yet—don't you worry!"

CHAPTER XIX

About six miles from the centre of the city on the South Side, not far from the lake, might be seen the foundations and first two stories of a considerable building that had been abandoned for several years. It was to have been a hotel, but its promoters, who were small capitalists from a distant city, had been caught in the real estate disasters of '93. Litigation ensuing among themselves, nothing had ever been done with the property. The unfinished walls, standing at the corner of one of the boulevards and overlooking a large park, were a landmark in the neighborhood. A thick growth of weeds partially covered the loose piles of brick and stone that littered the ground and filled the hollow shell. Desolate, speedily disintegrating, the ruin stood there, four windowless walls, a figure of unsubstantial and abortive enterprise.

Hart had often passed the ruin when his business called him to that part of the city. One day this summer, as he was driving through the park with Graves on his way to inspect the last string of cheap stone houses that the contractor had built, Graves called his attention to the place.

"That pile must be pretty well covered with tax liens," the contractor observed, as they turned into the boulevard and approached the ruin. "It's a sightly piece of property, too, and the right spot for a family hotel."

"Who are the owners?" Hart asked.

"A lot of little fellers out in Omaha; they got to fightin' among themselves. It might be had cheap. Let's go over and take a look at the place."

He hitched his horse to a tree in front of the ruin, and the two men pushed their way through the weeds and rubbish into the cellar.

"Pretty solid foundations," the contractor observed, picking at a piece of mortar with the blade of his clasp knife. "There's most enough stone lying around here to trim the whole building. What do you think of the walls? Has the frost eat into 'em much?"

They scrambled in and out among the piers and first story walls, testing the mortar, scraping away the weeds here and there to get a closer view of the joints. The upper courses of the brick had been left exposed to the weather and were obviously crumbling. The architect thought that the outer walls might have to be rebuilt almost from the foundations. But the contractor observed that it would be sufficient to rip off half a dozen courses of the masonry, as the walls were needlessly thick.

"Those fellers thought they were going to build a jim-dandy Waldorf, judging from the amount of stone they were putting in," the contractor remarked, as they climbed into the buggy and resumed their way to the city. "I guess it wouldn't be much of a risk to buy up the tax rights. The land and material would be worth it."

"I should say so," the architect assented, seeing how the matter was shaping itself in his companion's mind.

"Those foundations would take a pretty big building, eight or ten stories."

"Easily."

They talked it over on their way back to the city. The contractor had already formed a plan for utilizing the property. He had in mind the organization of a construction company, which would pay him for building the hotel with its bonds, and give him a large bonus of stock besides. The architect was familiar with that method of finance. The hotel when finished would be rented to another company for operation, and by that time the contractor and his friends would have disposed of their stock and bonds.

"You must let me in on this," Jackson said boldly, as they neared the city. "I'm getting sick of doing your dinky instalment-plan suburban villas and getting nothing out of it. I want to make some money, and this scheme looks pretty good."

"There's no reason why you shouldn't make something, too," the contractor answered readily. "You might interest some of your rich friends in the company, and get a block of stock for yourself."

Hart had a pressing need of ready money rather than such dubious promoter's profits. Rainbow and Harris had not pushed him to pay the balance against him on their books, but their leniency would not extend beyond the first of the month. Then, if he could not get the money in some other way, he should have to go to his mother, or take the little legacy that his uncle had left Helen. That very day he had had it in his mind to ask the contractor to let him have twelve thousand dollars on his note, which would get him out of his immediate difficulties. He could pay it with the first return from the school commission, on which he was reckoning.

But when Graves described the hotel project, he resolved to wait a little longer, in the hope that somehow he might make more than enough to pay his debts. What he needed was some capital. It was to obtain this independent capital that he had ventured with the broker. Why had he not had the wit to see the chance that lay in that old ruin and use it on his own account? For the last five years many men that he knew had been making fortunes, while he was working hard for precarious wages. No matter what he might earn in his profession, he could never feel at ease, have enough for his ambitions. He saw that his fees from the practice of architecture would never satisfy him. He must have capital,—money that would breed money independently of his exertions. Latterly his mind had turned much about this one desire.

"You'll want me to draw the plans for the hotel, I suppose?" he asked the contractor.

"Yes, you might get up some sketches for a ten-story building right away—something to show the men I want to interest in the scheme," Graves answered promptly. "When you have 'em ready, come around and we'll see if we can't fix up some kind of deal."

It was evident that the contractor had gone much farther in the hotel matter than he had told Hart. Probably he had already taken measures to get control of the abandoned property and had his corporation organized.

At this point Jackson learned from Everett that the trustees were ready to ask him for preliminary sketches for the school, and almost at the same time he received a polite note from the brokers calling his attention to his debt. He went at once to Graves's office and asked the contractor for the loan, saying that he was to have the school and should be put to extraordinary expenses in his office for the next few months. The contractor let him have the money readily enough on his personal note. Graves did not speak of the hotel, and for the moment the school had driven all else from the architect's mind. He was kept busy these days by consultations with the trustees and the director of the school, getting their ideas about the building. One morning the newspapers had an item, saying that "F. J. Hart, the prominent young architect, nephew of the late Powers Jackson, had received the commission for building the new Jackson Institute, and was engaged in drawing plans for a magnificent structure, which in luxury and completeness would outrank any similar institution in the country." Before noon that same day Hart received a curt message from Judge Phillips to call at his office, and foreseeing trouble with the trustees about the newspaper paragraph, he went scowling into the draughting-room.

"Some of you boys must have been talking loose about what's going on in this office," he said accusingly.

"The Tribune man had the story straight enough when he came in here," Cook replied in defence. "He must have got it from some one who knew what he was talking about."

Hart went over to the judge's office and tried to explain matters to the old gentleman, who, besides having a great dislike of "newspaper talk," felt that the trustees were being deliberately coerced into giving their commission to this pushing young man. The architect was forced to swallow some peppery remarks about indelicate methods of securing business. When he left the judge, who was only half convinced of his sincerity, he went to see Graves, and vented his irritation on the contractor.

"You let things leak out of your office. You got me into hot water by giving out that story about the school."

"How so? It's straight, ain't it? You've got the building? You said so the other day when you came in here to borrow that money."

"It amounts to the same thing, though it hasn't been formally settled. They are touchy enough about their old job. They've asked me to prepare the first sketches—that's all so far."

"Oh! That's all, is it?" the contractor remarked coldly. "I thought you had the job in your inside pocket from the way you talked the other day."

Hart's face reddened and he stammered:—

"It's all right. They are sure to take me, only they are a little slow, and I don't want to seem to force them."

Graves continued to examine the man before him with his shrewd little eyes, and Hart realized that the contractor had given the news to the papers for the precise purpose of finding out where the trustees stood.

"Well, when you get ready to build the school I expect we shall be doing a good deal of business together," Graves remarked tentatively.

The architect moved back in his chair, more comfortable at the change in the conversation.

"I shall want you to bid, of course. But I don't know yet whether the trustees mean to let the contract as a whole."

"They'll do pretty much what you say, won't they? Ain't one of them your cousin?"

"Yes."

"Well, I want that contract. Can't you fix it so's I can get it?"

Hart knew altogether too well what the contractor meant by this blunt request. An architect has it in his power to draw his specifications in such a manner that only a few favored contractors will dare to bid. If outsiders venture to bid for the work, they cannot with safety go low enough to get the contract. In the case of a large building this is a more difficult manoeuvre to manage than with less important work. Yet even with a building of the importance of the projected school, contractors would be chary of bidding against a man who was as closely identified with the architect as Graves was with Hart.

"They say now," Hart protested, "that nobody else gets a show in my office."

"I don't believe you see what there might be in this for you, Mr. Hart," the contractor persisted, without replying directly to the architect's objection.

A stenographer interrupted them at this point, and the architect had a few moments to think while Graves was engaged. He knew better than any one else the devious methods of the contractor, and it had already occurred to him that this would be a good opportunity to sever his close connection with the Graves Construction Company. He would, of course, allow Graves to bid on the school contracts, but would show him no favors. Yet the contractor's last words made him reflect. There was the hotel with its unknown possibilities of large returns. Moreover, the Graves Construction Company was no longer the weak enterprise that it had been five years before. Graves had made a great deal of money these last prosperous years, and his "corporation" was one of the largest of its kind in the city. It would be stupid to break with the man altogether.

"Come, this ain't quiet enough here. Let's step over to Burke's and talk it out," the contractor suggested, looking up from the papers the stenographer had brought in.

So the two men went across the street to Burke's, which was a quiet sort of drinking-place, frequented by the better class of sporting men. In the rear there were a number of little rooms, where whispered conversations intended for but two pairs of ears were often held. When the negro attendant had wiped the mahogany table and brought them their whiskey, Graves began:—

"Mr. Hart, I'm going to give you the chance of your life to make a lump of money, sure and quick, and no gold-brick proposition, either."

Graves poured himself a drink, and meditatively twirled the small glass between his fat fingers before he explained himself.

"You do the right thing by me in this school job, and I'll see that you are properly fixed on the hotel scheme."

The details of the plan came cautiously and slowly from the contractor, while Hart listened in a non-committal frame of mind. The thing proposed was really very simple. The architect was to draw the school specifications so that only a few firms would bid, and of these only one or two would be genuine competitors. The contractor would see to it that there were enough bidders at approximately his own figure to prevent suspicion on the part of the trustees. In return for this favor, Graves offered a large block of stock in the hotel company, "for doing the plans of the hotel," which he was ready to guarantee would be worth a certain sum.

Of course there was an unspecified item in the transaction, which was perfectly obvious to the architect. If the contractor was ready to make these terms in order to obtain the school, there must be enough in the job above the legitimate profit on the contract to make it well worth his while. The architect saw, less sharply, that this extra profit would be made, more or less, with his professional connivance. It would be impossible to get the trustees to accept bids so high that the contractor could reap his profit and still do the work up to the specifications. It would be necessary to specify needlessly elaborate steel work, cut stone, and interior finish, with the understanding that the Graves Company would not be forced to live up to these gilt-edged specifications. It might be necessary, even, to prepare two sets of specifications for the more important parts of the contract,—one for the bidding, and one for the use of the subcontractors,—although that would be dangerous.

Hart smoked and listened, while Graves, having outlined his plan, spoke of the profit to the architect.

"If you want, I'll agree to take the hotel stock off your hands at par from time to time as the two buildings go up. You can figure out now what you'll make. It will not be far from seventy thousand dollars, what with your commissions and the stock. And I'll guarantee, Hart, that you'll have no trouble. That drunken Dutchman can work over any details that have to be fixed—my own expense. Nothing need go through your office that ain't first-class and regular."

The plan seemed perfectly simple, and the architect's imagination fastened on the big bait which the contractor held out. Graves repeated slowly in his thick tones:—

"A year, or say eighteen months, from now, you'll have about seventy-five thousand dollars in the bank."

That would be capital! The lack of capital had tripped him at every turn. With that amount of money, he could plant his feet firmly on the earth and prepare to spring still higher.

"Of course," Graves continued, "you'd stand by me—help me out with the trustees if there was any kick."

In other words, for the term of a year or eighteen months he would be this contractor's creature. But the architect was thinking of something else....

The line between what is honest and dishonest in business is a difficult one to plot. From generation to generation standards alter in the business world as elsewhere, and to-day men will do unblushingly, and with the approval of their fellows, that which in another generation will, doubtless, become a penitentiary offence. Business is warfare, and whatever men may say on Sundays, the hardy man of business will condone a thrifty sin of competition sooner than any other sin. Every one of the fighters in the battle knows how hard it is to make a dollar honestly or dishonestly, and he prefers to call certain acts "indelicate" or "unprofessional," rather than dishonest.

Of such "unprofessional" conduct Hart had been guilty a number of times, and the matter had not troubled him greatly. But this arrangement, which the contractor was urging, was of more positive stripe. Although it was not clear how close a connivance with fraud would be necessary, it might involve outright rascality, which, if it became known in the community, would ruin his professional standing for life. He would be taking a great risk to grasp that promised lump of money. While Graves talked in his thick, guttural tones, Hart was weighing this risk. The whiskey that he had been drinking had not obscured his vision in the least, although it shed a rosier glow over the desired capital. It must be admitted that the architect gave little consideration to the trustees or to his uncle's bequest. It would have pleased him, if he had thought much about it, to make a good round hole in his uncle's millions, of which the old man had deprived him. And as for the trustees, they were shrewd men of the world, quite able to take care of themselves.

But, instinctively, he recoiled from the act. He would much prefer a clean, honorable, "high-class" career. If he could have secured money enough to satisfy his ambitions, to lead the kind of life he liked, without resort to such knavery as this, it would have been much pleasanter. But in one way or another he must make money, and make it more rapidly and more abundantly than he had been doing. That was success. When he had come to this point, he had already consented with himself....

They had been sitting there nearly two hours, but latterly little had been said. The contractor was patient and diplomatic. Finally he asked, "Well, Hart, what do you say?"

Hart lighted another cigar before speaking, and then replied deliberately: "I will think over what you say. I understand that the stock is given me instead of my regular commission on the hotel, and will be worth a fixed sum?"

"That's it!"

Then they went out into the street without further words. Hart returned to his office, examined his mail, wrapped up his first sketches for the school, and set out for the train. The deal with Graves unconsciously filled his mind and made him feel strange to himself. Yet he thought less of the practical detail of the transaction than of certain specious considerations concerning the morality of what he was going to do.

Business was war, he said to himself again and again, and in this war only the little fellows had to be strictly honest. The big ones, those that governed the world, stole, lied, cheated their fellows openly in the market. The Bushfields took their rake-off; the Rainbows were the financial pimps, who fattened on the vices of the great industrial leaders. Colonel Raymond might discharge a man on his road who stole fifty cents or was seen to enter a bucket shop, but in the reorganization of the Michigan Northern ten years previously, he and his friends had pocketed several millions of dollars, and had won the lawsuits brought against them by the defrauded stockholders.

It was a world of graft, the architect judged cynically. Old Powers Jackson, it was said in Chicago, would cheat the glass eye out of his best friend in a deal. He, too, would follow in the path of the strong, and take what was within his reach. He would climb hardily to the top, and then who cared? That gospel of strenuous effort, which our statesmen and orators are so fond of shouting forth, has its followers in the little Jackson Harts. Only, in putting forth their strong right arms, they often thrust them into their neighbors' pockets. And the irresponsible great ones, who have emerged beyond the reign of law, have their disciples in all the strata of society,—down, down to the boy who plays the races with the cash in his employer's till.

The architect went home to his wife and children with the honest love that he bore them. If they had entered his mind in connection with this day's experience, he would have believed that largely for their sakes, for their advancement in the social scheme of things, he had engaged upon a toilsome and disagreeable task. For he did not like slippery ways.

CHAPTER XX

Hart's design for the school had finally been accepted by the trustees, and the plans were placed on exhibition in the Art Institute. Little knots of people—students, draughtsmen, and young architects—gathered in the room on the second floor, where the elevations had been hung, and had their say about the plans. Occasionally a few older men and women, interested in the nobler aspects of civic life, drifted into the room, having stolen some moments from their busy days to see what the architect had done with his great opportunity.

"Gee! Ain't it a hummer, now!" exclaimed one of Wright's men, who had known Hart in the old days. "He's let himself out this time, sure. It will cover most two blocks."

"The main part of the design is straight from the Hotel de Ville," one of the young architects objected disdainfully. He and his friends thought there were many better architects in the city than F. Jackson Hart, and grumbled accordingly. "I bet I could find every line in the design from some French thing or other. Hart's an awful thief; he can't think for himself."

"Where is the purpose of the structure expressed?" another demanded severely. "It would do just as well for the administration building of a fair as for a school!"

"A voluptuous and ornamental design; the space is wickedly wasted in mere display. The money that ought to go into education will be eaten up in this pretentious, flaunting building that will cover all the land." ...

"What have I been telling you?" commented an admiring citizen to his neighbor. "Chicago ain't a village any more. A few buildings like this and the university ones, and the world will begin to see what we are doing out here!"

"What's the dome for?" ...

"I say the people should have the best there is."

"Pull, pull—that's what's written all over this plan! The architect was some sort of relation to the man who gave the school, wasn't he?"

Even Wright, who happened to be in the city, stepped into the Institute to look at the plans. He studied them closely for a few minutes, and then, with a smile on his face, moved off.

Hart had, indeed, "let himself out." It was to be a master work, and by its achievement raise him at once into the higher ranks of his profession. For the first time he had felt perfectly free to create. As often happens, when the artist comes to this desired point and looks into his soul, he finds nothing there. The design was splendid, in a sense—very large and imposing: an imperial flight of steps, a lofty dome which fastened the spectator's eyes, and two sweeping wings to support the central mass. Nevertheless, the architect had not escaped from his training; it was another one of the Beaux Arts exercises that Wright used to "trim." Years hence the expert would assign it to its proper place in the imitative period of our arts, as surely as the literary expert has already placed there the poet Longfellow. Though Hart had learned much in the past six years, it had been chiefly in the mechanics of his art: he was a cleverer architect, but a more wooden artist. For the years he had spent in the workshop of the great city had deadened his sense of beauty. The clamor and excitement and gross delight of living had numbed his sense of the fine, the noble, the restrained. He had never had time to think, only to contrive, and facility had supplied the want of ideas. Thus he had forgotten Beauty, and been content to live without that constant inner vision of her which deadens bodily hunger and feeds the soul of the artist.

So Wright read the dead soul beneath the ambitious design.

Mrs. Phillips came rustling in with friends, to whom she exhibited the plans with an air of ownership in the architect.

"It's the cleverest thing that has been done in this city; every one says so. I tell Harrison that he has me to thank for this. It was a case of poetic justice, too. You know the story? One forgets so easily here; it's hard to remember who died last month. Why, the old man Jackson left pretty nearly every cent of his money to found this school. I think he was crazy, and I should have fought the will if I had been a relative. At any rate, it was a nasty joke on this Mr. Hart, who was his nephew and every one thought would be his heir.

"But he has made such a plucky fight, got the respect of every one, gone right along, and succeeded splendidly in his profession. He married foolishly, too. Poor girl, not a cent, and not the kind to help him one bit, you know,—no style, can't say a word for herself. She's done a good deal to keep him back, but he has managed to survive even that. I wonder he hasn't broken with her. I do, really! They haven't a thing in common. They had a pleasant home out in the Park, you know, and a good position—every one knew them there. He is the kind to make friends everywhere. And what do you think? She made him give up his house and come into town to live! The Park was too far away from her friends, or something of the sort—wanted to educate her children in the city, and all that. I believe it was jealousy of him. He was popular, and she wasn't. No woman will stand that sort of thing, of course.

"So now they have taken a house on Scott Street,—a little, uncomfortable box, the kind of place that is all hall and dining-room. Of course they don't have to live like that; he's making money. But she says she doesn't want to be bothered—has ideas about simple living. The trouble is, she hasn't any ambition, and he's brimful of it. He could get anywhere if it weren't for her. It's a shame! I don't believe she half appreciates even this. Isn't it splendid? He has such large ideas!

"Venetia is thick with her, of course. You might know she would be. It's through Mrs. Hart she meets those queer, tacky people. I tell you, the woman counts much more than the man when it comes to making your way in the world; don't you think so?" ...

And with further words of praise for the plans and commiseration for the architect, the widow wandered into the next room with her friends, then descended to her carriage, dismissing art and life together in the prospect of dinner.

Helen made a point of taking the boys to see their father's work, and explained carefully to them what it all meant. They followed her open-eyed, tracing with their little fingers the main features of the design as she pointed them out, and saying over the hard names. It was there Venetia Phillips found her, seated before the large sketch of the south elevation, dreaming, while the boys, their lesson finished, had slipped into the next room to look at the pictures.

"Have you seen my mother?" she asked breathlessly, seating herself beside Helen. "I brought Dr. Coburn, and we almost ran into Mrs. Phillips the first thing. So I dodged into the Greek room and left him there to study anatomy. She had that horrid Rainbow woman with her and would have been nasty to the doctor. Mother is such a splendid snob!" she explained frankly.

"Well, well, our Jackie has done himself proud this time, hasn't he? He's a little given to the splurge, though, don't you think?"

Helen did not answer. She did not like to admit even to herself that her husband's greatest effort was a failure. Yet she was a terribly honest woman, and there was no glow in her heart. Indeed, the school and all about it had become unpleasant to her, covered as it was with sordid memories of her husband's efforts to get the work. Latterly there had been added to these the almost daily bickerings with the trustees, which the architect reported. The plans had not been accepted easily.

"All the same, Jack's got some good advertising out of it," Venetia continued encouragingly, noticing Helen's silence. "The newspapers are throwing him polite remarks, I see. But I want to talk to you about something else. Mamma has been losing a lot of money; bad investments made in boom times; sure things, you know, like copper and steel. She's very much pressed, and she wants to put my money up to save some of the stocks. Uncle Harry is raging, and wants me to promise him not to let her have a cent. Stanwood has come home—there doesn't seem to be anything else for him to do. It's all rather nasty. I don't know what to say about the money; it seems low to hold your mother up in her second youth. And yet the pace Mrs. Phillips keeps would finish my money pretty soon. It's a pity Mrs. Raymond won't die and give mother a chance to make a good finish."

"Venetia!"

"What's the harm in my saying what all the world that knows us is saying? It's been a ten years' piece of gossip. I feel sorry for her, too. It must be rough to get along in life and see you have muckered your game.... Do you know, I am terribly tempted to let her have the money, all of it, and skip out myself. Perhaps some of these days you'll read a little paragraph in the morning paper,—'Mysterious Disappearance of a Well-known Young Society Woman.' Wouldn't that be original? Just to drop out of everything and take to the road!"

"What would you do?"

"Anything, everything—make a living. Don't you think I could do that?" She embroidered this theme fancifully for a time and then lapsed into silence. Finally she burst forth again: "Good Lord, why can't we get hold of life before it's too late? It's going on all around us,—big, and rich, and full of blood. And folks like you and me sit on the bank, eating a picnic lunch."

"Perhaps," mused Helen, "it would be different if one had to earn the lunch."

"Who knows? Will you try it? Will you cut loose from Jackie?"

A rather sad smile crossed the older woman's face, and Venetia seizing her arm impulsively gave it a little squeeze. Just then Coburn strolled into the room with the boys, whom he had found in the corridor, and nodding abruptly toward Helen, stood before the plans, studying them with his sharp, black eyes. His little ironical smile hung on his parted lips. Turning to Venetia, he said good-humoredly:—

"Thinks he's doing something, don't he, Venetia?"

Helen rose and called the boys.

"A building is just four walls and a roof to me," he continued, addressing Helen. "But Jack Hart seems to have got what he wanted—that's the chief thing, ain't it?"

Helen nodded, and they left the room without looking again at the plans. As they descended the broad flight of steps to the street, Venetia laid her hand on Helen's arm.

"Tell Jack we are all proud of him. Mamma brags of him daily. And look out for the paragraph in the paper. They'd give me a paragraph, don't you think?"

The winter twilight had descended upon the murky city, filling the long vistas of the cross streets with a veil of mystery. But the roar of the place mounted to the clouds above, which seemed to reverberate with the respirations of the Titan beneath. Here, in the heart of the city, life clamored with a more direct note than in any other spot in the world. Men were struggling fiercely for their desires, and their cries ascended to the dull heavens.

Helen walked home with the boys, soothed by the human contact of the streets. There was something exhilarating to her in the jostle of the throng,—the men and women leaving their labors, bent homeward for the night. Her heart expanded near them—those who won their daily bread by the toil of the day.

It was in part true, what the widow had said. For it was she who had willed to return to the city from the pleasant niche where she had spent her married life, desiring in the growing emptiness of her heart to get closer to the vast life of a human people, to feel once more the common lot of man. So she had taken the little house on Scott Street, and reduced their living to the simplest scale, declaring that she wanted her time for herself and her children. Her husband was so busy that as yet he hardly noticed any change in her. They went out less than they had gone in previous years, and sometimes he thought the people he found calling on his wife were "queer." Her interest in a new kind of education for the children bored him. She seemed to be going her own way without thought of him, and now and then he wondered what it meant. He did not like aggressive, faddish persons; he wanted women to be personal and sympathetic, with a touch of "style," social tact, and a little dash.

To-night he had come from his office early, and while he waited for Helen he looked about the little drawing-room disapprovingly, with a sense of aggrieved discomfort. Helen was taking to economy and simplicity altogether too seriously to please him. To be sure, she made no objection to his keeping his hunters at the Shoreham Club, or his polo-playing, or other expensive diversions.

In a vague way he was aware of the subtle separation of soul that existed between them. He looked at his wife closely when she came in with the boys. She seemed older, more severe in face than he had thought, than her photograph on his office desk said. When this school business was done with, he reflected, they must run over to Europe for a few months' vacation, get shaken up, and then live differently on their return....

"Nell," he said to her, when they were alone, "it's settled at last, you will be glad to know, everything. We let the contracts to-day."

"For the school?" she asked indifferently. "You must be relieved to have it off your mind."

Her lips, which curved so tenderly, had grown strangely firm. He put his arm over her shoulder and drew her toward him.

"Yes, it's a great relief. I thought at one time Pemberton would make them throw the whole thing up and start again. But the others had more sense. Well, when the building is finished, we must have a spree, and get to be lovers once more."

"Yes, dear. This afternoon I've been to the Institute with the boys to let them see the plans."

"They are well spoken of. I saw Wright to-day for a moment. He stopped to congratulate me, but I couldn't tell what he really thought. Well, after all the trouble with them, I got pretty much what I wanted, thanks to Everett and the doctor. Everett's been a good friend all through. The idea of their kicking so hard because the thing was going to cost a little more than they had made up their minds to spend on the building! Pemberton thinks he knows all about architecture. It's a pity he couldn't have drawn the plans himself."

"But you saved your design. There were only a few changes, I thought."

"Yes, I've won the second round all right."

In his joy over the thought he put his strong arms about his wife and lifted her bodily from the floor, as he had often done, boyishly, in the years before. Holding her close to him he kissed her lips and neck. She returned his kisses, but the touch of her lips was cool. She seemed limp in his arms, and he felt vaguely the want of something. She was less loving, less passionate than ever before. He missed the abandon, the utter self-forgetfulness, the rush of ecstatic emotion, which from the first moment of their love had made her for him all woman, the woman of women.... He let her slip from his embrace and looked at her. Was it age? Was it the penalty of living, which dampens the fire of passion and dulls desire? He was troubled, distressed for the loss of something precious that was getting beyond his reach, perhaps had gone forever.

"Oh!" he exclaimed. "It's bad to be always on the dead push. Come! Let's go out somewhere and have dinner and a bottle of champagne the way we used to."

She hesitated a moment, unwilling to disappoint him.

"I can't very well to-night, Francis. I promised Morton Carr I should be home this evening. He wants me to help him raise some money for his new building, and we were to discuss it."

"Oh!" he said, his egotism subtly wounded. "I remember you said something about it."

CHAPTER XXI

Late in March the corner-stone for the Jackson Institute was laid. It was a desolate winterish day, and the prairie wind chilled to the bone the little group of interested people seated on the platform erected for the occasion. There were brief speeches by Judge Phillips and Dr. Everest, and an address by a celebrated college president on the "new education." To Helen, who sat just behind him in sight of the piles of excavated sand and the dirty brick walls of the neighboring stores, the scene was scarcely in harmony with the orator's glowing generalizations. "The mighty energies of this industrial cosmopolis will now respond to the higher call of man's ideals.... On industry rests thrift, and on thrift must rest all education." As the neat periods slipped forth, Cook, who was standing by the mason's windlass, caught Helen's eye and smiled. He looked brisk and happy, and she could fancy him calling out: "Hey! What does the guy know about industry? But ain't this the best yet? F. J. Hart is all right!"

The architect, smartly dressed for the occasion in a new frock coat and shining silk hat, stepped forward at the proper moment, dusted the upper surface of the great stone with a brush, and handed the judge a silver trowel. Cook pushed up to them a bucket of mortar, into which the old man thrust the trowel, and tremblingly bespattered the stone. Then the windlass creaked, and down came the massive block of Indiana limestone, covering the recess into which had been stuffed some records of the present day. Then the architect and Cook busied themselves adjusting the block, while the judge stepped backward to his seat, a look of relief coming over his red face, as if he felt that he had virtually executed the trust left him by his old friend.

As the gathering dispersed, Helen's eyes fell upon a great wooden sign surmounting the workmen's shed: THE GRAVES CONSTRUCTION COMPANY—GENERAL CONTRACTORS—CHICAGO AND NEW YORK.

So this was the company that had finally secured the general contract for the building. As Helen knew, there had been vexatious delays over the bids. The first figures had been very much in excess of the sum the trustees had intended to spend upon the building. They had forced the architect to modify his plans somewhat and to ask for new bids. Pemberton had been especially obstinate, and Hart had grumbled about him to his wife:—

"Why does the old duffer chew the rag over a couple of hundred thousand, when they have over three millions, anyway? It doesn't come out of his pocket!"

At last, after some wrangling, the trustees had accepted the lowest bid, though it was still considerably beyond the figure they had set. Hart regarded it as a triumph: he had saved substantially the integrity of his design, and the Graves Company got the contract.

Now all was serene. From the hour that the contract was signed, the building rose from nothingness by leaps and bounds. Graves was always rapid in his operations, and for this building he seemed to have made every preparation beforehand. The labor situation, which was still unsettled, caused him no delay. His rivals said that he had the leaders in the unions on his pay-rolls, and could build when other contractors were tied up by strikes. Other firms could not get their steel from the mills for months, but Graves had some mysterious way of securing his material when he wanted it. The day after the corner-stone was laid he had an army of men at work; early in June the walls were up to the roof trusses; by the end of July the great edifice was completely roofed in, and the plasterers were at work.

The contracts once signed, the judge and Wheeler seemed to regard that their responsibilities were over. Hollister, who had been in poor health latterly, had gone to Europe. But Pemberton was the bane of the architect's life. He visited Hart's office almost daily, looked carefully at every voucher before ordering it paid, and spent long afternoons at the works. He examined the building from foundation to roof with his thrifty New England eye, and let no detail escape him, stickling over unimportant trifles, and delaying the numerous orders for extras or alterations. The whole operation of modern building was an unknown language to him. He knew that he was ignorant of what was going on before his eyes, and his helplessness made him improperly suspicious of the architect and the contractor. Many a time he strained Hart's habitual tact. They nearly came to blows over some window frames, which the architect had seen fit to alter without consulting the building committee.

One morning Hart found Pemberton at the school in company with a stranger, who made notes in a little memorandum book. The trustee nodded curtly to the architect, and, as he was preparing to leave, remarked casually:—

"This is Mr. Trimble, Mr. Hart. Mr. Trimble is an engineer, who has been in my employ from time to time. He will look through the works and make a report. Mr. Trimble will not interfere with you in any way, Mr. Hart. He will report to me."

The architect's face grew white with suppressed rage, and his lips trembled as he answered:—

"What is your reason for taking this step, Mr. Pemberton? When I was given the commission, nothing was said about having a superintendent. If there is to be one, he should report to me. As you know quite well, I have devoted my entire time to this building, and given up other work in order that I might be out here every day. I shall speak to the other trustees about this, and I'll not stand the insult, Mr. Pemberton!"

"Tut, tut, no insult, Mr. Hart. You must know that it's quite usual in work of this magnitude for the owners to have their representative at the works. There will be no interference with you or the contractor, if the building goes right."

The architect swallowed his anger for the time, merely answering sulkily: "Mr. Graves will take no orders except from me, of course. The contracts are so drawn."

"What's that!" Pemberton exclaimed. "I hope there will be no occasion to alter that arrangement."

The architect bowed and left the building.

"Snarling, prying old fogy," he spluttered to his wife, who was waiting outside in the automobile. "Let him put in his superintendent. I guess we can give him a run for his money."

The woman's heart sank. Somehow this school, this bit of great-hearted idealism on the part of the old man she loved, had thus far stirred up a deal of mud.

Pemberton did not think it necessary to discuss with the architect his reasons for engaging Mr. Trimble as superintendent, but he had what seemed to him sufficient cause to look into the building more thoroughly than he was able to himself. After the contract had been let, the trustees had received a number of anonymous letters, which made charges that all had not been square in getting the bids for the building. These letters had gone into the waste basket, as mere cowardly attacks from some disgruntled contractor. Then, one day while the building was still in the rough, and the tile was going in, Pemberton overheard one of the laborers say to his mate:—

"Look at that stuff, now. It ain't no good at all," and the man gave the big yellow tile a kick with his foot; "it's nothin' but dust. Them's rotten bad tiles, I tell yer."

And the other Paddy answered reflectively, scratching his elbow the while:—

"It'll go all the same. Sure, it's more money in his pocket. Ain't that so, boss?"

He appealed to Pemberton, whom he took for one of the passers-by gaping idly at the building.

"What do you mean?" the trustee demanded sharply.

"Mane? The less you pay the more you git in this wurld!"

"Hist, you fule," the other one warned, twisting his head in the direction of the boss mason, who was not far away.

Pemberton was not the man to take much thought of a laborer's idle talk. But the words remained in his mind, and a few weeks later, happening to meet the superintendent of a large construction company in the smoking-car of the Forest Park train, he asked the man some questions about fireproof building.

"Why did your people refuse to bid the second time?" he inquired finally.

"They saw it was just a waste of time and money," the man replied frankly.

"What do you mean by that?"

"Why, the job was slated for Graves—that was all. It was clear enough to us. There's mighty little that goes out of that office except to Graves."

"Is that so? I asked Mr. Hart particularly to have your company bid on the contracts."

Then the man became confidential, and explained how a certain ambiguity in the wording of the specifications made it risky for a contractor to bid unless he knew just how the architect would treat him; for the contractor might easily "get stuck" for much more than the possible profits, though bidding in perfect good faith. The man was willing enough to talk, once started on the subject, and in the course of half an hour he explained to the layman some of the chicanery of the building business.

"So you see, Mr. Pemberton, the contractor, to protect himself when he doesn't know his man, bids pretty high, and then the favored contractor can safely go a good bit lower. He has an understanding with the architect, maybe, and it all depends on how the specifications are going to be interpreted."

And he told other things,—how some of the firms who had bid had since got parts of the general contract from the Graves Company, but with an altered set of specifications.

"It's queer," he ended finally. "We can't see how they'll make a cent on the contract unless Graves is goin' to rot it clear through."

He explained what he meant by "rotting" it,—the use of cheap grades of materials and inferior labor, from the foundation stones to the cornice. In other words, the building would be a "job."

"For those specifications called for a first-class building, and no mistake,—awful heavy steel work, and cabinet finish, and all that. If it's built according to specification, you're going to have a first-class school all right."

The result of this chance conversation was that after consultation with Judge Phillips, Pemberton sent to Boston for the engineer Trimble, whom he knew to be absolutely honest and capable.

When Hart left Pemberton, he went directly to Wheeler's office and exploded to his cousin. His anger at the affront offered to him had entirely hidden the thought of the disagreeable complications that might follow. He took a high stand with Wheeler about the trustees' lack of confidence in him. But the cool lawyer, after hearing his remonstrances, said placidly:—

"If Pemberton wants this man Trimble to go over the building, I don't see how you can prevent it. And I don't see the harm in it myself. I suppose everything is all right. See that it is,—that's your business. Pemberton would be a bad man to deal with if he found any crooked work. You'd better look sharp after that fellow Graves."

The architect assured his cousin that there was no need to worry on that score. But he began to realize the dangers ahead, and felt a degree of comfort in the fact that Graves had only that week paid him in cash for the second block of his Glenmore hotel "stock." With the previous payment he had now thirty-five thousand dollars lying in his bank, and a large payment on the commission for the school would soon be due him.

Trouble was not long in coming. Trimble, who was a quiet little man, and looked like a bookseller's clerk, was waiting for Hart one morning at the office of the works. He made some pointed inquiries about the plumbing specifications. There seemed to be important discrepancies between the copy of the specifications at the works and the copy which Pemberton had given him from the office of the trustees.

"Yes, a good many changes were authorized. There were good reasons for making them," Hart responded gruffly.

The little man made no remarks; he seemed to have inquired out of curiosity. Then he asked questions about some blue-prints which did not correspond with the written specifications, explaining that he had gone to the mill where the interior finish was being turned out and had found other discrepancies in the details prepared for the woodwork. Hart answered indifferently that he would find a good many such changes, as was customary in all buildings. At this point Graves arrived; he came into the little shanty and looked Trimble over without speaking. After the engineer had left, Graves turned to the architect, an ugly frown on his heavy face:—

"Say, is that little cuss goin' to make trouble here?"

Hart explained briefly what had happened.

"Do you think we could fix him?" the contractor asked without further comment.

The architect noticed the "we" and sulked.

"I guess you'd better not try. He doesn't look like the kind you could fix. It's just as well that most of the work is done, for it seems to me he means trouble."

"All the finish and decoratin' is comin', ain't it?" the contractor growled. "I tell you what, if he holds up the mill work, and keeps fussin' round, there'll be more than one kind of trouble. I won't stand no nonsense from your damned trustees." He swore out his disgust and fumed, until Hart said:—

"Well, you'll have to do the best you can. And I'll try to keep the trustees quiet."

The Glenmore hotel was going up rapidly, and he thought of the twenty thousand dollars which would be coming to him on the completion of that building—if all went well. But if there should be a row, there would be no further profits for him on the hotel.

"The best I can!" Graves broke forth. "I guess you'll have to take care of them. You'd better see your cousin and get him to call this feller off, or there'll be trouble."

"I have seen Wheeler," the architect admitted.

"Well," the contractor blustered, "if they want a fight, let 'em come on. There'll be a strike on this building in twenty-four hours, I can tell you, and then it'll be years before they can get their school opened."

With this threat the contractor left the office, and Hart went over to the great building, which had become a thorn in his flesh these last weeks. It was not a bad piece of work, after all, as Chicago building was done, he reflected. Even if Graves had cut the work in places, and had made too much money on the steel, the stone, and here and there all over, the edifice would answer its purpose well enough, and the architect had no special interest in the everlasting qualities of his structures. Nothing was built to stand for more than a generation in this city. Life moved too swiftly for that.

For several weeks, as the end of August came near, there was a lull, while Pemberton was in the East on his vacation. The work on the school went forward as before; even the irritation of seeing Trimble's face was removed, for he had ceased to visit the works. Then, the first week in September, the storm burst. There came to the architect's office a peremptory summons to meet the trustees the next afternoon.

CHAPTER XXII

Powers Jackson had given the old Jackson homestead and farm at Vernon Falls in Vermont to Helen, and with it a small legacy of twelve thousand dollars "as a maintenance fund." She had opened the house but once or twice since her marriage, because Jackson was always too busy to take a long vacation, and she did not like to leave him. Latterly she had thought about the old man's gift a good deal, and there had been some talk of her spending the summer in Vernon Falls with the children and her mother. Instead of this they had gone to the Shoreham Club for a few weeks in August, putting off the journey East till the fall.

She had never touched the legacy, leaving it in Everett Wheeler's hands, securely invested, and had paid what was needed to maintain the old place from her allowance. Now, however, a number of repairs on the buildings had accumulated, and it occurred to her one day, when she was in the city, to find out from Wheeler how much surplus she had at her disposal. They had joked a good deal about her estate, and the lawyer had scolded her for not coming to his office to examine the papers and see what he was doing with her money.

It was late in the afternoon when she had finished other, more urgent errands, and, turning into the lofty La Salle Street building, was whirled up to the twelfth floor. The middle-aged stenographer in Wheeler's office looked up on her entrance, and said that the lawyer had not left, but was engaged with some gentlemen. Would she wait? She sat down in the quiet, carpeted outer office, from which radiated several small offices. The doors of all these rooms were open except one, and through the ground-glass panel in this door she could see the dark forms of several men. Presently the stenographer pushed her papers into the drawer of her desk, and fetched her hat and coat.

"I think they must be 'most through," she remarked pleasantly. "You go right in when they come out."

Then she gathered up her gloves and left. Little noise came from the hall, except the occasional sliding back and forth of elevator gates. The vast hive seemed to be deserted at this hour, and few places in the city were so quiet and lonesome as this sober law office. The murmur of voices in the inner room was the only sound of life. Gradually the voices grew louder, but Helen paid no attention to them until a man's voice, clear and shrill with exasperation, penetrated distinctly to the outer office.

"No, Wheeler!" the man almost shouted. "We won't compromise this. I won't have it covered up or whitewashed. We'll go to the bottom, here and now. Let us find out what all this double-dealing means. Let us know, now, whether the work on that building is being done honestly or not, and whether our architect is working for us or for the contractor against us."

It was Pemberton's voice, and Helen recognized it. From the first words she had grasped the arms of her chair—a sudden clutch at her heart. She held herself rigid, while behind the door a confused murmur of men all talking at once drowned Pemberton's voice. She tried to think whether she ought to leave the office, but her strength had gone, and she trembled in her chair. Presently Pemberton's high voice rang out again:—

"No, sir! We've given you this opportunity to explain your conduct and clear yourself. You haven't done it, sir! You try to bluster it through. There is something wrong in this business, and we shall find out what it is. Not another dollar will be paid out on your vouchers until our experts have gone through all the papers and examined every foot of the construction so far done. No, Wheeler, I will resign if you like. You asked me to join you. I was glad to do so. I considered it an honor and a duty, and I have made sacrifices for this trust. But if I stay on the board, this thing must be cleared up!"

Another high and angry voice answered this time:—

"You'd better not make loose charges, Mr. Pemberton, until you are in a position to prove what you say. I won't stand your talk; I don't propose to stay here and let you bully me—I'm going!"

Helen recognized her husband's voice, and she got to her feet, still clutching the chair. Then she stepped forward unsteadily toward the inner office. The handle of the door moved a little, and against the glass panel the form of a man stood out sharply.

"What are you going to do about it? Sue Graves? Or sue me? You can discharge me if you like. But I am your agent and have full powers. Remember that! That's the way the contract is drawn. And if I back up Graves, what are you going to do about it? He's got your agent's signature for what he's done.... You'd better hold your temper and talk sense." ...

"Don't threaten me, sir!" Pemberton retorted. "I have all the proof I want that you are a rascal, that you have entered into a conspiracy with this man Graves to swindle." ...

There were sounds of a scuffle within the office,—the noise of falling chairs, the voices of excited men. Above all the clamor rose the cool tones of Wheeler:—

"Come, come, gentlemen! This is not business."

As he spoke, a weight fell against the door from the outside. The man nearest the outer office, who happened to be Judge Phillips, opened the door, and Helen fell, rather than walked, into the room, her face white, her hands stretched before her.

"Francis! Francis!" she called.

It was not her husband, however, who sprang to her aid. He was too startled to move. Wheeler, who was leaning against his desk with his hands in his pockets, leaped forward, caught her, and carried her from the room.

"Nell, Nell!" he muttered to himself. "Why did you come here!"

CHAPTER XXIII

Husband and wife did not speak while they were being driven across the city to their home. That which lay between them was too heavy to be touched upon at once in words. Several times the architect glanced fearfully at his wife. She rested limply on the carriage cushion, with closed eyes, and occasionally a convulsive tremor twitched her body. The summer heat, which had raged untempered for weeks, had already sapped her usual strength, and now her face had a bloodless pallor that made the man wince miserably. When the cab stopped at the North Side bridge, where a burly vessel was being pulled through the draw, Helen opened her eyes languidly; once or twice she sought her husband's face, which was turned blankly toward the crowded street. Her lips moved, and then she closed her eyes again. As they got out of the cab, a neighbor who was passing spoke to them and made a little joke, to which Jackson replied pleasantly, with perfect self-control. The woman leaning on his arm shivered, as if a fresh chill had seized her.

The children were spending the month in Wisconsin with Jackson's mother, and so the two sat down to a silent dinner. When the maid had come and gone for the last time, Hart looked furtively across the table to his wife and said gently:—

"Won't you go upstairs, Nell? You don't look able to sit up."

She shook her head and tried to speak, but her voice was gone. Finally she whispered:—

"Francis, you must tell me all about it,—everything!"

He frowned and said nothing, until she repeated, "Everything, you must tell me!" and then he replied:—

"See here, Nell, you'd better drop this thing and not think of it again. That man Pemberton, who has pestered the life out of me all along, has made a row. He's an ill-tempered beast. That's all. And he'll repent it, too! He can't do anything to me. It's a business quarrel, and I don't want you to worry over it."

He was cool and assured, and spoke with the kindly authority of a husband.

"No, Francis!" She shook her head wearily. "That can't be all. I must know what it is—I must help you."

"You can't help me," he replied calmly. "I have told you enough. They can't do anything. I don't want to go any further into that business."

"I must know!" she cried.

He was startled at the new force in her voice, the sign of a will erecting itself with its own authority against him.

"Know what? What that fool Pemberton thinks of me? You heard enough of that, I guess."

"Don't put me off! Don't put me away from you, now, Francis! If we are to love each other, if we are to live together, I must know you, all of you. I am in a fog. There is something wrong all about me, and it gets between us and kills our love. I cannot—bear—it!"

Her voice broke into pleading, and ended in a sob. But controlling herself quickly, she added:—

"Mr. Pemberton is a fair man, a just man. But if he's wrong, I want to know that, too. I want to hate him for what he said to you."

"You would like to judge me, to judge your husband!" he retorted coldly. "That is not the way to love. I thought you would believe in me, all through to the end."

"So I shall—if you will tell me all the truth. I would go with you anywhere, to prison if need be, if you would be open with me."

"We needn't talk of going to prison yet awhile!" he exclaimed in exasperation.

He went to the sideboard, and pouring himself a glass of whiskey, set the decanter on the table.

"They can't do anything but talk," he repeated. Then, warmed by the liquor, he began to be more insolent, to speak defiantly.

"Pemberton's been after me from the start. He wanted Wright to get the work in the first place, and he's tried to put every obstacle he could in my way. It was first one thing and then another. He has made life unendurable with his prying and his suspicions. But I won't stand it another day. I'm going to Everett to-morrow and tell him that I shall get out if Pemberton is to interfere with my orders. And they can't lay a finger on me, I tell you! Pemberton can just talk!"

Helen had put her head between her hands, and she was sobbing. Every hot word that he spoke drove conviction against him into her heart. At last she raised her tear-stained face and cried out with a new access of power:—

"Stop! Stop!"

Then she rose, took the decanter of whiskey, replaced it on the sideboard, and seated herself by his side, putting her hand on his arm.

"Francis, if you care for me, if you want us ever to love each other again, answer me honestly. Have you and that contractor done anything wrong about the school?"

"You can't understand," he replied roughly, drawing his arm from her touch. "You are making a great deal out of your own imagination."

"Answer me!" she said, in the same tense tone of pure will. "Have you let that man Graves cheat the trustees,—do anything dishonest,—and shut your eyes to it?"

"Pemberton claims he hasn't lived up to the specifications," the architect admitted sullenly.

"And you knew it?"

"So he says."

There was a moment's silence between them while the vision of this fraud filled their minds. She seemed to hesitate before the evil thing that she had raised, and then she asked again, quickly:—

"Have you—did you make any money from it?"

He did not reply.

"Tell me, Francis!" she persisted. "Did this man give you anything for letting him—cheat the trustees? Tell me!"

He was cold and careless now. This new will in his wife, unexpected, so totally unlike her gentle, yielding nature, compelled him to reveal some part of the truth. In this last resort her will was the stronger. He said slowly:—

"If he got the school contract, there was an understanding that he was to give me some stock in a corporation. It was involved with other business."

"He was to give you stock?"

"Yes; stock in a hotel that he's been building—another piece of work."

"And he gave you this stock?"

"Some of it."

"What have you done with it?"

"Sold it."

"You have sold it?"

"Yes. It was a kind of bonus he gave me for getting him the contract and for doing the plans for the hotel, too."

Further than that admission he would not go, and they left the subject late at night. He was sullen and hard, and resented her new tone of authority to him; for he had always counted on her acquiescence and tenderness as his immutable rights.

In the morning this feeling of resentment was more firmly fixed. He regretted that in a moment of weakness he had admitted what he had the night before. When she came to him as he was preparing to leave the house, and, putting her hands on his arms, begged him to talk with her again before going to the office, he listened moodily and said that he was pressed for time.

"Won't you go to them, to the trustees, to Everett, anyway, and tell them everything you know? And give them that money—the money you got from the stock?"

"That's a woman's plan! That would make a nice mess, wouldn't it? I told you I got that as a bonus. I have worked a lot for this contractor, and he offered me this chance to make some money in one of his schemes. It's often done, something like that. You'd like to see me get into trouble—be disgraced for good and all?"

"That can make no difference now," she answered quietly. "The disgrace cannot be helped."

"What rot!" he sneered. "You make me out a thief at once. Suppose you look at what some of your acquaintances do,—the good, rich people in this town,—and find out how they make their money. Ask people how Silas Stewart gets his rebates from the railroads. Ask any one about the way Strauss grades his wheat."

"I don't want to know," she interrupted sadly. "That has nothing to do with this matter."

He left her impatiently. They did not reopen the sore that evening, nor the next day. Her face was set and stern, with a kind of dreary purpose in it, which made him unhappy. He went out of the city on business, and did not return for several days. When he came home no mention was made of his absence, and for another week they lived silently. The night before the children were to return from their vacation with their grandmother, while husband and wife lay awake, each troubled by the common thought, she spoke again.

"Francis," she said firmly, "we can't go on like this. The boys are coming home to-morrow. They mustn't see us living this way. And it's bad for you, Francis, and I can't stand it! I have been thinking it over. I must go away with the boys. I shall go to uncle Powers's house in Vernon Falls."

"You are going to leave me and take the children with you because you think I am in trouble," he said accusingly.

"You know that isn't true. If you will only meet this trouble honorably, like the man I loved and married, I will stay, and be with you always, no matter what comes. Will you?"

"So you want to make conditions?"

"Just one."

"You had better go, then."

She turned her face to her pillow and wept in the dreary realization that she could touch him in no way. The next day she telephoned her mother to come to her, and when Mrs. Spellman arrived, she said quietly:—

"Mother, I am going to Vermont, to the farm. It may be for a long time. Will you come with me and the boys?"

Mrs. Spellman, who was a wise woman, took her daughter's face between her hands and kissed her.

"Of course," she answered simply.

That day they made the necessary preparations for themselves and the children. When the architect returned from his office and saw what was going forward, he said to his wife:—

"So you are determined to leave me?"

"Yes, I must go unless—"

"I have seen Everett. They aren't going to do anything. I told you it was all bluff on Pemberton's part."

She hesitated, uncertain what to think, and then she asked searchingly:—

"Why aren't they going to do anything? What does it mean?"

"Oh, I guess the others have brought Pemberton to his senses," he replied evasively. "At any rate, it's blown over, as I told you it would."

"No, Francis! It isn't made right yet. You would be different if it were. Somehow, from the beginning, when first there was talk of this school, it has all been wrong. I hate it! I hate it! And the trouble goes back of that, too. It starts from the very beginning, when we were married, and began to live together. We have always done as the others do all around us, and it is all wrong. I see it now. We can never go on again in the same way—"

"What way? I don't understand you in the least," he interrupted.

"Why, just earning and spending money, trying to get more and more, trying to get things. It's spoiled your work; it's spoiled you; and I have been blind and weak to let us drift on like the others, getting and spending, struggling to get ahead, until it has come to this, to this,—something dreadful that you will not tell me,—something base that you have done to make money. Oh, how low and mean it is! How mean it makes men and women!"

"That's life," he retorted neatly.

"No, no, never! That wasn't what you and I thought before we married. I wish you were a clerk, a laborer, a farm-hand,—anything, so that we could be honest, and think of something besides making money. Let us begin again, from the very beginning, and live like the common people from day to day—live for your work, for the thing you do. Then we should be happy. Never this way, not if you make millions, millions!"

"Well, I can't see why you are set on going away," the architect answered, content to see her mind turn from the practical question.

"Tell me!" she exclaimed passionately. "Tell me! Is it all right with that building? With that contractor? Are you honest? Are you an honest man? Tell me, and I will believe you."

"I have said all that I am going to say about that matter," he answered stubbornly.

"Then, Francis, I go!"

The next afternoon the architect met his family at the train and saw them start, punctiliously doing all the little things that he could to make their journey comfortable. He referred to their going as a short vacation trip, and joked with the boys about the farm. Just before the train started, while Mrs. Spellman settled the children in their section, Helen walked up and down the platform with him. As the signal for starting was given she raised her veil, revealing the tears in her eyes, and leaning toward him kissed him. She put into his hands a little card, which she had been holding clasped in her palm. He raised his hat and stood on the platform until the long train had pulled out of the shed. Then he glanced at the card in his hand, which read:—

"I shall wait for you to come to me when you really want me. H."

He crushed the card in his fist and threw it into the roadbed.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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